Installing new hard drive

27col

I have started getting warnings about the fact that my 80Gb hard drive is running out of space. About 2.3Gb left, this is mainly due to the fact that it is full of photos and several more added every day. I propose to buy a 320Gb Western Digital drive as a replacement.
Could someone tell me the easiest and safest way to transfer all the data from the old to the new drive.
Any help much appreciated.

Stompa

Is this 80GB drive you are thinking of replacing your C drive?

BillScarab

Are you talking about an internal or external hard drive?

If it's an internal add it as an extra drive not a replacement. Just use Windows explorer to drag and drop the files from one drive to the other.

Willeh

As Bill said if it's an external hard drive add on then it's a simple case of plugging the external hard drive into your PC, then dragging files from the internal hard drive to the external hard drive.
If you're taking the internal hard drive out and replacing it with another internal hard drive, you could then possibly back up all your information onto a CD, then replace the hard drives, install the operating system, pop the CD which has all the backed up info and follow whatever instructions come up to restoring that info onto your new hard drive.
Here's a good tutorial if you use XP:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/bott_03july14.mspx

As suggested in the tutorial, only back up what is important to you and is irreplacable e.g. photos, videos, music. No need to back up important system files as they come with the operating system installation. And there's no point in backing up programs as you can reinstall them again on your new hard drive.
Good luck!

BillScarab

If it's a desktop you can just install it as a second hard drive so it's easy to drag and drop files. If it's a laptop I would just buy an external hard drive as it's a lot simpler that way. It also makes it easier if you replace the laptop.

Conor_3

Go to the Western Digital website. There in the downloads section is a file that allows you to create a bootable CD. With both the new and old drive in the computer, boot from the CD and you can clone the old drive onto the new one.

Avoriaz

Have you run ccleaner or similar to remove all the accumulated carp on the disk?

darich

loaner wrote: »

unless you are a pro photographer, it's unlikely to be all photos. Download WD data lifeguard to do the transfer of windows/data

I'm not a pro photographer and I've got almost 80gb of photos on my machine.

My brother is even less pro than me but takes video and he mentioned the other day he has 140gb of images/video of his 8month old son.

27col

Yes, I was thinking of replacing the C drive. However, I have been looking and it says that the pictures are taking 7Gb, so this is obviously not causing the problem. The rest of the stuff seems to be taking no more than 1Gb. So what is all the disc space being filled up with. More investigation required I think. I will have to snivel round my son.
Anyway, many thanks to you all for your replies.

Conor2_2

If it's Windows Vista you're running, it's the Volume Shadow Copy service. If it's XP, it may be System Restore points. In either OS, open up My Computer. Right click on the C drive and select properties. Click on Disk Cleanup. In the next window, select more options tab. Under the System Restore bit, click on the Clean Up butten then OK etc.

Once you've done all that, download and install Crapcleaner from https://www.ccleaner.com . Run that and that'll clear out everything else.

Marty_J

loaner wrote: »

Video is much bigger than a photo, 80GB of average megapixel jpg's is about 60,000 photos, 16 photo's every day for 10 years

I'm not sure I'd agree with your calculations. If you had an 8 megapixel camera, you'd get around 300 photos per gigabyte.

It's very easy to shoot a few hundred photos a day, and 80GB could (and evidently does!) fill up in no time. I was at the park for an hour the other day, and I took almost 200 photos, of which this is probably the only one I'll keep.

27col, do you ever go through your photos and delete ones you don't want?