Replacing a laptop HD

mcnutsuk

Just did a health check on the laptop HD and it is looking grim (though I am writing to you from it). I am looking to replace the 3 year old 40gig hard drive on my laptop for fear that it may be on the frit and I really don’t want to loose my PhD thesis (which I have backed up elsewhere)

What I would like to do is buy a new laptop hard drive and somehow put an exact copy of the current drive on this laptop. I don’t want to install everything again as I have an old version of XP (SP1) and I don’t have all the software disks with me. If I buy a new hard drive for my laptop, is it possible to make an exact copy and then install the new hard drive? I just dont really know how I get the new laptop hard drive fresh from the package to actually have my data on it?

I'm in London, do you think if I bought a laptop drive from a store they would do this as a service or perhaps charge a small fee to do the install?

Help, comments appreciated

needstoknow

there are programs that you can use, but the easiest is when you buy your new laptop get them to do it for you, they will transfer everything across and maybe upgrade some software! they may charge a fee for this but if ur buying a new pc off them they should be cool with it! no halm in askin!

Little_John

The dificult thing here is that you can only ever fit 1 drive in a laptop at any one time. there are a few options.

you can buy external cases for 2.5" drives to make it a USB drive and this would allow you to use norton ghost or any other drive copying software.

I used to work for a campany we had a system that allowed up to make coppies of 12 hard drives at once and it came with convertors for 2.5" drives. you could get a pair of these convertors and put both drive in a pc and copy them.

the easiest option if you have an external drive already use ghost or whatever to make an image of your existing drive and restore the image to your new drive once it is installed.

If your near Bolton/Manchester and need some help let me know I have a USB thing than will allow me to connect a bare drive to the usb port so it could be coppied.

I would have sugested the image to dvd/CD but your drive is 40GB and I doubt the image will fit on a DVD or a few dvds if they will span. you can write the image to the same drive that you are backing up

oasis13

hi,
software such as acronis true image and norton ghost does this. I recently did this with Acronis TrueImage.

Firstly, still on the old harddrive you can make an image of your whole harddrive (including operating system) and then burn it to CD/DVD. Then in Acronis TrueImage you can create a boot CD or boot floppy. Then you put your new empty harddrive in and boot from the bootable cd you created. This will load into the RAM allowing you to take out the boot CD and put in the image DVD of your harddrive that you created. The software will then slap this onto teh harddrive and you will be good to go!

mcnutsuk

oasis13 wrote:

hi,
software such as acronis true image and norton ghost does this. I recently did this with Acronis TrueImage.

Firstly, still on the old harddrive you can make an image of your whole harddrive (including operating system) and then burn it to CD/DVD. Then in Acronis TrueImage you can create a boot CD or boot floppy. Then you put your new empty harddrive in and boot from the bootable cd you created. This will load into the RAM allowing you to take out the boot CD and put in the image DVD of your harddrive that you created. The software will then slap this onto teh harddrive and you will be good to go!

Great help and advice thus far. If I make a bootable CD and then have an image backed up to an external USB drive, after I install the new HD, do you reckon I will then be able to access the image from the USB external drive where the image is stored?

oasis13

mcnutsuk wrote:

Great help and advice thus far. If I make a bootable CD and then have an image backed up to an external USB drive, after I install the new HD, do you reckon I will then be able to access the image from the USB external drive where the image is stored?

Yep.

Always back up your important data though :cool:

albertross_2

Norton Ghost £30.... writes directly to a CD or DVD writer, supports usb, put the new drive in, boot from the CD/DVD, and it will recreate your system perfectly. 40GB is about 4-6 single layer DVD's worth when compressed.

If you are still using XP SP1, and aren't patching with windowsupdate, you should consider it..

when you say you did a health check, do you mean the hard disk is full? If so, cleanup with https://www.ccleaner.com, and consider compression, (unless it is full of mp3s mpgs which won't compress any further), or you could buy an external hard disk.