Laptop hard drive upgrade / clone

bluboy

Hi all

I'm sure there's quite a few of you out there looking to upgrade to a bigger laptop hard drive so I thought I'd let you know how I got on and hopefully point you in the right direction.

I had a Dell Inspiron 1300 - Win XP SP3 - 40GB 2.5" IDE Hard drive which was running low on space. Toshiba MK4032GAX

I wanted to 'clone' the existing drive to a new big one (i.e. copy the complete set up - Windows, programs, data, documents etc) to give me the extra HD space without having to reinstall XP and all my existing programs. Unfortunately, unlike a desktop HD, you can't just plug a new laptop HD onto a spare IDE (or SATA) connection alongside the old drive so I chose to use USB. (I already had a USB 2.0 caddy similar to the ones you get for a fiver on ebay).

I eventually settled on the 160GB Western Digital WD1600BEVE on sale at ebuyer who delivered it free and it turned up the next day!

Unfortunately the free WD Data Lifeguard utility doesn't support cloning to USB!! To make things worse, the free copy of Acronis True Image Personal that I and everyone else downloaded last month has the clone function removed. If I'd have bought a Seagate or Maxtor drive I could have made use of their free utilities but you live and learn.

The saviour was the free 15 day trial version of Acronis True Image Home.

I started out by doing a bit of housekeeping and a defrag on the old drive.
I put the new (unformatted/uninitialised) WD 160GB into the USB caddy and connected that to the laptop. I verified that it was being seen by XP
in XP Disk Management. Here I also noted that the old drive contained 2 hidden partitions in addition to the C: drive. These turned out to be the Dell Recovery and Diagnostic partitions and since the new drive would have lots of free space I decided to copy them over as well.

I then fired up Acronis True Image and set about cloning the drive.
The Clone Disk Wizard gives you options to clone the drive 'as is', i.e. copy the existing partition(s) over to the new drive exactly as they are (size-wise), allowing you to do what you like with the remaining space.
You can also clone your existing partition(s) and have them expanded proportionally to fill the space on the new drive.
You can also choose to clone to your own preferred partition sizes.

I opted to clone the 40GB drive 'as is' and this took around 40 minutes. I left the remainder as unallocated space as I wanted to see howeasy it was to partition it from within XP. When Acronis was done it was just a matter of swapping the drives (two screws) and booting up.
I then split the remaing drive space into two new partitions from within XP's own Disk Management.
Not sure yet whether to keep the old drive as an emergency back up or stick it in the caddy as a spare drive.
But anyway that was job done.

A doddle really. My only regret is perhaps the choice of drive itself. The lack of USB cloning support from WD was ridiculous and the drive itself
is not as quiet as the old Toshiba.
But then who cares when you've got all that space.

:T
Thanks to macman, AHAR and GunJack for their input on threads
[thread=1525633]Copying Disk to Disk Query[/thread] & [thread=1519555]buying laptop hard drive[/thread]