Moving / cloning hard drive from old laptop to new laptop

[turkum99]

Hello, I have a Lenovo T400 with a 500gb hard drive( with all my software and files) running win 7. I bought a Lenovo T410 with a 750gb Hard drive, running win 7, and nothing else in it. I want to put everything from the T400 hard drive on to the T410 hard drive. How can I do this? Thank you in advance

 

[CDdude55]

Cloning works well only if the hardware is alike, otherwise you could find yourself swimming in issues.

If you have any sort of removable media to back up data on i'd use that, such as a flash drive, external HDD or even a CD (though they save considerable less data then the former methods).

If you have have games on Steam, they have there own backup system where you can just pick wher you want the game files backup to.

 

[noidea_77]

Get an external eclosure for the 750gb hdd, connect it to the old laptop and use a clone software, like arconis to clone the old drive. If it's a system builder verison of windows, that is tied to the mobo, you may have to change the product key on the first start (control panel / system).

 

[pauls3743]

Something else to consider is using your network to transfer your files.

Setup both machines with the same username and password.
On your new laptop, open up My Computer and type into the address bar "\\<name of old computer here>\<drive letter here>$" and hit return/go.
This will give direct file and folder access to copy files from your old laptop.
You will still need to use the original installation media/files/executables/binaries to install software onto your new laptop, this cannot be simply copied from the program files fodlers.