Possible to copy hdd to another hdd? For OS?

Well, copying your data and copying your OS are different processes. If the old drive is from a machine that came with Windows installed, this is not legal; the OEM license that came with the old machine cannot be moved to a new machine. If the old drive is from a machine that you built with an XP disc that you bought separately, you can transfer the drive to the new machine.

It's still preferable to do a new build if you have the time; you get a cleaner copy of the OS.

There are many free utilities that will copy the old drive to the new one so that the new one will be bootable. Clonezilla in the Parted Magic distribution, EASEUS ToDo backup, many other options. Clone the old drive to the new one, then boot from the new one.

Sure. Just make an image of the disk.

I use Acronis (paid program), but I'm sure there are plenty of free disk cloning programs such as Parted Magic.

Google "clone disk" and see what you come up with.

So, If i clone it. It'll work just like the old hard drive?

Hi  

No, firstly its ILLEGAL , secondly, it will rarely boot into Windows, so you will HAVE to do a clean install anyway...(WITH a Windows disc AND a LEGAL number NOT AN OEM NUMBER)

All the best Brett  

1. As stated, you can't use the same license on two different machines.

2. If the hardware is dissimilar, the OS will most likely fail on boot as it will contain all the wrong drivers for the new hardware. Your best bet will be to clean install the OS on the new machine with a new valid copy of windows.

oh sorry, we are probably not on the same page.

Im using the new HDD for the same machine, Im just upgrading it because the old hdd has less space. So im taking the data I have from the old hdd to the new one, but its going to be on the same machine.

That's legal under the license. You can use something like Acronis Trueimage or Ghost to create the clone.

Hi again,
I successfully cloned the HDD using drive image xml but for some reason I cannot boot the OS from the HDD. It gave me the "insert bootable device...." message.
Does anyone have suggestions?

Hello,
I was able to boot up a cloned hdd by using EaseUS Todo Backup. BUT, when I check the drivers, it showed 2 disk, one called Local disk(250gb) and one called New Volume( 214gb). The thing is, the destination hdd is 1 tb and the source hdd was 500 gb. How come it shows it like this?

Before, It would just show the hdd as a whole. Which is around 950gb or so.

Try disk management to adjust the partition size. It is part of Windows 7. You can google Windows 7 adjust partition size or try something like: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/resize-a-p...

You didn't tell the cloning software to expand the partition when you cloned it over. You should be able to use disk management to extend the partition.