My hard drive is dyin on my Acer Extensa, how do I transfer my OS to the new hard drive ?

Lee Wesley

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Apr 17, 2015
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My laptop is telling me that the hard drive will fail very soon and I need to know if it's an easy task to transfer my OS to the new drive.
 

spdragoo

Expert
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There's no truly easy, quick & simple way to do it. Yes, there are a number of tools out there that let you clone your drive -- some require that both be identical (i.e. can only clone a 1TB HDD to a 1TB HDD), others let you clone between dissimilar hardware (i.e. cloning the 200GB of data from your 1TB HDD onto a 250GB SSD), just depends on which one you use -- but a) the best & most complete tools are generally not free (most of the free ones either require the new hardware to be identical to the old, or are limited in how many times you can use it/how big of an image can be cloned), and b) it takes a long time to clone & transfer data (we are talking literally about gigabytes of data).

Somewhat slighly more complex, but having more options available, is the use of backup software. Most of the companies that offer cloning software either also offer backup software or the software allows you to do both. Depending on how much of your data is backed up, it may take longer or shorter time to back it up than cloning the drive. The only issue is that you'll have to reinstall from scratch for the new drive, then install the backup software & restore from the backup image from antother drive (which means you'd need 3 drives: the old failing drive & 2 new ones).

The third alternative is if a) you have all of the original installation files (either on disk or downloaded) for all of your programs/games/applications, b) you have your original Windows installation media (DVD or USB), & c) you have the time to let your PC sit & work by itself. Basically, 1) just pull your old drive out, 2) pop a new drive in, 3) run a clean Windows install, 4) run the updates, 5) reattach the old drive, 6) make sure your BIOS is set to always boot from the new drive 1st, 7) reinstall all of your programs, 8) pull the program data & personal files (savegames, pictures, videos, bookmarks, Favorites, downloads, etc.) from the old drive, & 9) reformat the old drive & toss it (if you can, maybe take a hammer or a drill to it first).