Changing hard drives how ???

Download a trial of Acronis True Image and clone the drives.
Hook up the new drive and clone it with True Image. Then shutdown, remove the old hard drive and boot up with the new hard drive in place.

Cloning with Acronis may not be right in this case. Firstly, it assumes that OP is confortable with installing HDD's from his old machine in the new machine temporarily for the cloning process. Is that right, musicmad, can you do this OK?

Then we have to face it - he / she does NOT want to clone completely. This is a new machine, presumably with its new OS already installed. OP does not want to clone everything from the old mahine's drives to the new one - that would wipe out the new OS with all its drivers, etc. What is really desired is to copy "all the files".

HOWEVER, "all the files" is not true. Musicmad, exactly what is it you want to copy over? Just the music files themselves (mp3's, etc.)? Are there software applications you want to move to the new machine, too? What about your collection of old e-mails, and address lists? Anything else?

Burning DVD's would take a lot of disks (use -RW's, of course) and a lot of time. It certainly will be much simpler and faster if you can temporarily install old HDD's in the new machine for copying, etc.

If the op, everything to run the same without reinstalling os, just with new hardware. You can use acronis true image echo universal restore.

Hi,

Yes basically its all my sub folders inside the my documents folder that contain all the data that i wish to transfer, 18.9Gb only! How do i go about software programs, is it possible to transfer these as data, or do thay need to be newly installed from disc???

I'm assuming from my 18.9Gb that it would be better to burn the data to DVD, how is this done???

Thanks guys for all your feedback..

Cheers
Musicmad