Need stupid man's guide to switching OS HDDs

[tiny voices]

I have been using a cheap used 160gb 1.5gbps sata HDD as my primary drive. Just tonight I tore apart an external HDD and now have a 6gbps sata3 2TB HDD. I want to move everything over, Including my installation of Windows 7 Professional to the new drive.

What is the best/ easiest/ hardest to mess up method for moving my OS and everything else to the new HDD. I assume people do this alot when upgrading to a SDD for a boot drive so there must be a relatively simply way to go about it.

Thanks for any help!

 

[tiny voices]

anybody? I feel like this is a common thing.

 

[tripledouce]

It is Fairly easy but you need the software to create an image of your OS to transfer. I personally use Acronis for my home computers and Ghost for work and enterprise. however both cost money, you can probably find a disk cloner software out there for free but i couldn't give you a step by step on how they work.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Clone the drive. Plenty of free cloning software out there. Try clonezilla.

http://clonezilla.org/

 

[tiny voices]

Clone the drive. Plenty of free cloning software out there. Try clonezilla.

http://clonezilla.org/

Would it be a better idea to reinstall windows? If I did that, would there be a way to move all my programs and software over so I don't have to reinstall them?

 

[Hawkeye22]

The only way to preserve installed programs is to clone. A clean install of the OS requires all drivers and programs to be reinstalled, as well as all OS patches/updates.

It is not recommended cloning from a HDD to a SSD or vice versa. But cloning from like drives is fine.

 

[tiny voices]

Best answer selected by tiny voices.

 

[tiny voices]

Is there any chance you could give me a little step by step for what exactly to do with the clonezilla stuff? Nothing crazy in-depth, just like a quick " download this, install here, run this, etc.."

Thanks!

 

[Hawkeye22]

Sorry, I don't have time for all that. Just read the online manual. I haven't used clonezilla in a while as I have Acronis True Image Home right now. Clonezilla, like most cloning software, is pretty similar. Most times you just need to select a source drive and a destination drive. You might want to give the options a quick look over. One in particular is a setting to resize the partition so that it will use the full size of the new drive unless you want a 160gig partition on a 2TB drive.

TIP: Disconnect all drives in your system (just yank the power from them) except for the source and destination drives. This will prevent you from copying the wrong drive or accidently over writing the wrong drive. After cloning, shut down the PC, pull the old OS drive and attach the new drive in it's place (same sata port). Now boot and check the bios to make sure it's now pointing to the new drive as a boot device. Once you make sure you can boot from the new drive properly, you can then shut down and reattach your other drives. If you don't need the data on the old drive, you can format it and use it as a storage drive.

 

[tiny voices]

Thank you very much.