Rebecca said:
Hi. I am using Vista Home Premium, so I do not have the CompletePC Backup
feature, sadly. I just finished reinstalling VISTA and a ton of programs,
only to realize stupidly that I am running out of hard disk space because
of
all the downloading I am doing. It would be pure hell to have to reinstall
everything again.
I want to replace my hard drive with one with double the capacity. Can I
copy / backup / whatever the entire c drive on to an external drive, then
copy the entire contents back on to the new disk drive? Apparently, I
have
to purchase a product such as Acronis True Image Family. Will this do the
job? Please give me some advice, and step by step in easy English. Thank
you
very much.
Rebecca:
It really would be best if you would provide some details about the system
you're working with (or intend to work with) along the following lines...
1. Is this a desktop or laptop/notebook PC?
2. If it's an OEM, e.g., Dell, Gateway, Compaq, etc., what's the make/model
of the machine?
3. What's the disk sizes of the HDDs involved? Are they PATA or SATA disks?
4. Can we assume the "external drive" you mention is a USB device which you
already have? Is it a "one-piece" commercial product or is it a USB
enclosure in which you previously installed a HDD?
5. Presumably after you "clone" the contents (see below) of your present
internally-connected HDD to your USB external HDD, you're planning to remove
that present internally-connected HDD from your PC and then install the new
larger HDD? Then you would plan to clone the contents residing on that USB
external HDD to the new HDD installed in your system? Do I have all this
right? Or do you have some other plan in mind?
Can we assume you have sufficient experience to do this?
6. And, just to verify...the *only* reason for replacing your present HDD is
to gain additional disk size - there's no problem affecting your present
drive, right? It boots without incident and the system functions without any
problems?
As you've indicated, and as you've heard from at least one other responder
to your query, you could use the Acronis program to "clone" the contents of
your present HDD to the new one. Acronis does have a fully-featured trial
version available and you could use that program to effect the disk-cloning
operation.
While the Acronis program is a fine program and highly recommended by many
users, the disk-cloning program we greatly prefer is the Casper 5 program.
For a variety of reasons (some of which I'll cover in this post) we prefer
it over the Acronis and other disk-cloning/disk-imaging programs for the
great majority of PC users.
1. So basically what you'll be doing after installing the disk-cloning
program on your present HDD is connect your USB external HDD to the system &
boot up.
2. You access the disk-cloning program and clone the entire contents of your
internal HDD to the USB external HDD. The process is relatively simple -
particularly so with the Casper 5 program as I will explain.
3. So at this point the "destination" drive, your USBEHD, is (for all
practical purposes) a precise duplicate of your present internally-connected
HDD, your "source" drive. It contains the OS, all your programs &
applications, all your personal data - in short, everything that's on the
source HDD.
4. After removing the "old" HDD and installing the "new" HDD in your system
you will repeat the disk-to-disk cloning process, this time the source HDD
is your USBEHD and your destination HDD is your new HDD. (There is no need
to partition/format the newly-installed HDD - the disk-cloning process will
take care of that.
But rather than my going into details re using the Casper 5 program
(although it's simple enough) in this post and explaining in more detail why
we prefer that program, let me end right here. If I've correctly understood
your objective you're interested in pursuing this general course of action
as I've outlined above and desire more info I'll be glad to provide it
including another option (more-or-less along the same lines) that may be a
more practical approach of meeting your objective.
Anna
