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Tips
Tips

New Hard Drive

I use HD Clone and put the new hard drive in an external usb drive and HD Clone will clone the new drive with the old one. The new drive has to be the same size or larger than the old drive. Not sure if that's what you really want to do. PJ
 
Hello Paul

Thank you

Exactly what I wanted to do. My C drive at the moment is 50 Gig on a 200 Gig drive.

Any particular Clone software?

David
 
Hello Paul

Thank you

Exactly what I wanted to do. My C drive at the moment is 50 Gig on a 200 Gig drive.

Any particular Clone software?

David

David, I use HD Clone, it's easy to use and very efficient, it can be downloaded for free, if you want the extras the program will cost for the pro version, so far I've used the free version with no complications. You plug the external drive in a USB port, open the HD Clone program, choose clone and it will come up with the primary drive and external drive or drives you want to clone to, you have to highlight each drive, hit clone and set back. PJ
 
What is the best way to migrate Windows 7 pro to a new HD on a desktop. The C drive has a D partition.

David

David - the few brain cells I have that still function, tell me that many Windows o/s installations had a hidden code on the HD, to prevent copying to another system.

You can copy the o/s, but after 30 days it says "please enter registration number" or something similar, and won't finish booting.

Can't guarantee 100% - but maybe something to check into.
Tom M.
 
Hello Paul and Tom

Thank you.

Will get a copy of HD Clone and give it a go.

Tom.
I think I ran into that before when I did some changes to computer. I had to connect to windows as far as I remember.

David
 
When I bought a Toshiba SSD, it came with migration software. My W 7 os was migrated with no problem. MS didn’t give me any messages.
 
Ended up getting a WD Blue drive 1 TB.

I presume I just plug the SATA and power cables in and launch the HD Clone software? Having made a rescue disk and backup.

Been a long time since I was in the computer internals.

David
 
Had a client call ~after~ he'd put a 1T SSD into his Win-7 Pro i5 box, tried to "copy" the O/S onto the SSD and said the system boots only if the original HD is connected... well, yeah. I successfully low-level erased the SSD and ghosted the O/S onto it. No issues now, boots to a desktop in half the time. The SSD is a Samsung 1T. We'll see if it lasts, I suspect it'll be fine.

WD's "Blue" is second-tier, IMHO. The "Black" ones may be a bit different. As Doug and Randall stated earlier, they used to be good but have fallen behind. Fuji had an issue a number of years back, wound up in a Class-action lawsuit over that. I had about four Fuji drives in clients' machines fail, swapped out others instead of waiting to see more failures. Never saw a dime from the lawsuit, never bought another Fuji drive, either.
 
Been thinking about the WD. May take it back and exchange it for a SSD as I originally intended.

Ant thoughts on make of SSD?

David
 
The first hard drive I ever saw was a whopping 10Mb Western Digital unit

When I bought my first computer (a first generation XT) it only had a 5.25" floppy drive. The first hard drive I bought for it (used) was a 10MB "Full Height" IBM drive (It took two drive bays to install). When I bought my second drive, I never thought I'd ever outgrow that one - it was a whopping 65MB (and cost over $400).
 
Thank you.
I will check the Samsung.

I helped a friend install a 10 Meg. HD and he said with this I will never need more space.

HDs are like basements. The more room you have the more junk you collect.

David
 
I believe M.2 drives have the wrong connections for this computer, mine has a space and connection for a 2.5 sata drive.
FWIW my Acer laptop is over 3 years old and can have both a 2.5" SATA style drive and an M.2. I went with a 2.5" SSD at the time because the M.2's were small and way expensive.
 
I've been running a .5T Crucial since 2015. No complaints. But I do keep the important stuff backed up to a RAID pair of 4Tb hard drives, just in case.

Been thinking about the WD. May take it back and exchange it for a SSD as I originally intended.

Ant thoughts on make of SSD?

David
 
Got my Samsung 860EVO 500GB drive and it does have clone software but is unclear if it will clone both C and D. Also if the partitions can be sized to suit. Reading the directions it seem to say it would clone the drive with the OS but did not mention other drives on the same disc.
Would HD Clone be better for the job?

David
 
Hi David,
I've been using Clonezilla for a bunch of years. I think Doc turned me onto it. It can clone a drive OR a partition. If you're migrating to a larger HD, drive cloning will clone both your C and D partitions to the same size as the original drive and have "unallocated" space left over. After you have cloned the drive, you can go into Windows Disk Manager and increase the partition sizes up to the amount of free space left on the drive.

I imagine most cloning software will do this in the same manner.
 
Clonezilla will faithfully clone the entire drive. As Greg notes, in Windoze you can go to the disk management program and shift partition sizes around to allocate the remaining space to suit.
 
One thing also nice is that SSDs are coming down in price, when they started advertising them they were way to pricey for the home user, but competition in the market has changed that! :encouragement:
 
Moore's Law.
 
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