Hard Drive replacement advice

--Tony--

Hi,

I want to replace my 40gb laptop HDD for a 120gb one.

I have a 2.5" USB caddy, can I use the caddy and another PC and simply copy the contents of the 40gb onto the 120gb then swap them over?

I am running XP home if that make a difference. I thought I read someware a long time ago XP limits the number of components you can change before it considers it a new system. I have only changed the RAM before.

Many thanks Tony

amcluesent

IMHO, your best best is to get a copy of Acronis True Image. That'll image your 40Gb to the 120Gb disk in the USB caddy and automatically resize the partition(s). Then you can swap the drives and it'll boot fine.

Once you've done that, you can use Acronis to make backups to the old 40Gb drive.

Avoid Norton Ghost, it's a piece of garbage.

NB Go for a 7200 RPM drive, it speed up a laptop quite noticeably.

--Tony--

Thanks for that, I though I could just copy and paste the drives, I did that once on a deskyop running 98.

I was going to buy this one from ebuyer:

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=24125198053&action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=97629

its 5400 not 7200, does not look like they have a 7200 drive, I will have to do some more hunting.

rizla01

Hi Tony.
coincidentally, I am in the process of replacing my dead 40 gig. If yours is excess to requirements then please consider me for it.
I have been searching the 'net for drives and found this.
http://rswww.com/cgi-bin/bv/rswww/searchBrowseAction.do?D=hard%20drive&Nr=AND%28avl%3auk%2csearchDiscon_uk%3aN%29&Ntk=I18NAll&Nty=1&Ntt=hard%20drive&Dx=mode%20matchpartial&Ntx=mode%20matchpartial&N=0&name=SiteStandard&forwardingPage=line&R=4804294&callingPage=/jsp/search/search.jsp&BV_SessionID=@@@@1445267439.1167567989@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccdiaddjkhdgghjcefeceeldgondhgh.0&cacheID=ukie

if it's of any use.

Also seem to be a lot of Western Digital drives a reasonable prices. don't know what they are like though but Maxtor is apparantly to be avoided.

amcluesent

I popped a Hitachi Travelstar E7K100 120Gb in my HP laptop. A tad pricey, but my laptop gets a lot of use (did someone say P2P?) and the E7K100 is supposed to be designed for 24*7 use.

--Tony--

Thanks Rizla01 but my caddy only has a very old 6gb drive in it so the 40gb will be a nice upgrade for that and as it is self powered it will make a very nice itunes store to save even more space on my laptop.

amcluesent

>I'm intrigued why you think ghost is a piece of garbage<

I bought a copy, one day it just silently failed. No error message, diagnostic, nothing. The agent icon just stopped showing up on the right of the XP status bar.

A few weeks ago my team tried to use the Ghost network backup. Failed. Ghost tells the domain controller it's a DOS app, Server 2003 domain controllers only allow Windows 2000 or better to access network resources. Rubbish programming - Norton could have spoofed the protocol.

Blacksheep1979

albertross wrote:

The fact that an icon vanishes from your startup, could be nothing to do with the program, and more to do with your PC config. Just run it manually, reinstall it or check it is still enabled with msconfig.

I have backed up from a dos network boot disk with ghost to 2003 servers loads of times, so I'm not sure what you are referring to, as far as I know, it's not an issue, you just have to make sure you have the right drivers on the disk.

agree 100%, never had any probs with ghost - tiz def the way forward, especially on a simple issue like the ops

Avoriaz

You could use this as an opportunity to install Windows XP and all your software etc from scratch and have a good clean installation again? It does take a few hours but it might be worth doing rather than just copying your old system.

It does mean that you have to go through the registration process again but that only takes a few minutes. There is a file somewhere which stores the registration data and I have read that you can simply copy that file to the same folder in your newly installed set up and bypass the re registration. Does anyone know the name of this file and where Windows stores it?

I would like to upgrade my 80gb 2.5 drive but upgrading to 120gb is not really worth it. I can’t find a 2.5 inch drive bigger than 120gb. If anyone knows a manufacturer who makes one please let me know. I would consider buying one if I can get at least 160gb. 5400 speed would be ok though faster would be better of course.

--Tony--

rizla01 wrote:

Hi Tony.
coincidentally, I am in the process of replacing my dead 40 gig. If yours is excess to requirements then please consider me for it.
I have been searching the 'net for drives and found this.
http://rswww.com/cgi-bin/bv/rswww/searchBrowseAction.do?D=hard%20drive&Nr=AND%28avl%3auk%2csearchDiscon_uk%3aN%29&Ntk=I18NAll&Nty=1&Ntt=hard%20drive&Dx=mode%20matchpartial&Ntx=mode%20matchpartial&N=0&name=SiteStandard&forwardingPage=line&R=4804294&callingPage=/jsp/search/search.jsp&BV_SessionID=@@@@1445267439.1167567989@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccdiaddjkhdgghjcefeceeldgondhgh.0&cacheID=ukie

if it's of any use.

Also seem to be a lot of Western Digital drives a reasonable prices. don't know what they are like though but Maxtor is apparantly to be avoided.

Is this not a 3.5" drive though, the session has times out but its here:

http://rswww.com/cgi-bin/bv/rswww/home.do

search: 4804294

trythat

if you get this moths PCW - vol 30 n3, then it has Paragon hard disk manager 6, this should do what you want as well.

Plus either last month or the month before that one of either PCpro or PCplus or even PCW have all three delivered and can't remember which one, but that had Acronis True Image not sure of version, but again should backup etc, you might even be able to get it from the sites download area