How Do I Move Data to New Hard Drive?

Name: Jack Iverson

I just got a new much bigger hard drive and I want to have my data from my small drive onto the big one. Is there an easy way to move data to new hard drive? Do I just copy and paste the files to the new drive or is there something I run? My old drive is 30 gigs and I now have a 250 gigs drive. How do I make the new drive like the old one?

You’ve got good timing with this question, Jack. I just barely did this exact thing with my machine. What you’ll want to do is get a copy of Norton Ghost, or Drive Image. There are several other imaging programs out there, but those are the two that I have experience with.

The very easiest way is going to be to hook your 30 giger up to another machine and make an image of it using Ghost. Following that you’ll disconnect the 30 gig and attach the 250 gig hard drive to that machine. Then write the image you just made to the 250 gig drive. Ghost will ask you if you want to resize the partition to your new drive’s size. I assume that you’ll want to do that. (Unless you want another, secondary, partition)

The way that I like to do it, and it’s much faster when you’re set up is to use Barts PE to do the brunt of the work.

Make a PE disk with the Ghost plugin (Follow the instructions with the plugin to get it setup) activated and then you can image straight from your little HD to your big one. That’s how I did my machine here. Took about 30 minutes to copy the 37 gig that I had used up to my new HD.