Moving Operating System to New Hard Drive

[Keda]

I want to install a new hard drive on my laptop. How can I keep the windows 7 operating system that is now installed on the current hard drive?

 

[cklaubur]

There are two ways to do so:

1. Buy an adapter that allows you to plug a hard drive into a USB port on the laptop, and use cloning software to clone the two drives.

2. Reinstall Windows 7 using recovery discs.


The second option gives you a clean copy of Windows, but you will need to back up any files you wish to save first.

Casey

 

[weaselman]

You can clone a drive, its is often a more simple way of doing the process, it will will retain all of the data of the old drive, its data and settings, any drivers installed or windows updates, and installed programs already residing on the old drive.

The problem is you can only have one Hd drive in a laptop at any one given time.
But if you use a software to clone the drive you often have the option depending on the size of the final image size to span the image across for example Dvd R disks if a Dvd writer exists in the laptop. The only other way is to take the drive out and connect it to a tower system that allows you to connect one or more Hard disks, The old one with the os for example and the new drive intended to install the cloned image of the first drive with the working os ect on it. You will retain all of the data on the drive as it is an exact copy. Then transfer all the data to the new drive. Then place it in the laptop again.