Changing Hard Drives

[jcage]

I have a Dell Dimension 8400 with a Western Digital HDD that's about 5 years old. It currently has XPproSP2 on it as an op sys. It's been a great machine but I'm starting to get concerned over the age of the hard drive. No issues, just trying to head off a crash.

Is there some good software that would allow me to install a newer, bigger hard drive in the machine and do a mirror image of the existing HDD to the new hard drive where when I was through, I could essentially 'rename' the new HDD as the 'C' drive and just remove the old hard drive and trash it?

It has a CD reader on it as the existing D drive and a CD/DVD burner as the E drive and I was thinking about unplugging those drives and trying to install the new hard drive as 'D', get the image copied over and then again, I guess it would be renaming the new drive as the C drive, if that makes sense. Once done, plug the two CD/DVD drives back in and pretty much be where I am now only with a new hard drive.

I'm thinking that years ago, Laplink made something that would work for this but thought I'd throw it out there for new ideas.

Thanks for any input,
John

 

[photonboy]

1) Get a WD drive (such as a 1TB Black)

2) Install the WD drive

3) Use CLONE software to:
a) Create two partitions (Partition 1 must be larger than your current C-Drive)
b) clone the current C-Drive to Partition 1 of the new drive

4) Boot into your BIOS and change the boot order so the 1TB drive boots first

5) Format the old drive

6) use the free WD Acronis software and make an IMAGE copied to your old drive.

There's other ways to do this like creating two partitions, then use WD Acronis to Image to Partition 2, then restore that image to Partition 1 on the 1TB drive.

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=613&lang=en

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disk_partitioning_software