Upgrading Your Notebook Hard Drive: Does It Make Sense?

Restore Your Windows To Your New HDD

To restore your Windows Vista or Windows 7 installation on a new hard drive, you have to boot from your Windows disc.

Select “Repair your computer” and pick the backup set you created.

Select Next to choose the recovery options. This Window is open because our newly installed Travelstar 7K500 is empty.

Here we need Windows Complete PC Restore.

If your USB hard drive that contains the system backup has already been plugged in, Windows Vista/7 will automatically find the last backup.

Just click Next to get going. It’s possible to adjust partition size afterward (in Windows Vista or later).

You can’t do any harm since your target drive is empty. Check that the backup is correct and click Finish.

The restore process took less than half an hour on our test system.

Make sure that your target hard drive is in fact at least as large as the old one. We tried the procedure with a smaller drive and the process failed.