My tweets

[claidheamhmor]

• Thu, 09:56: I upgraded my PC's hard drive last night. I hadn't realised it was so simple to move Windows 7 to a new drive. #fb

Comments

[filialucis]

Tell more?

[claidheamhmor]

Run the Windows Backup and Restore, back up C: drive as a system state to another drive (one with enough space). Create a system restore disk from Backup.

Then put in the new hard drive, boot off the system restore disk, and choose to restore the system from the backup. Choose the backup to restore from, and let it do its thing.

I understand you can even use it to restore to a different machine with different hardware.

[filialucis]

Wow, that's very neat! I hadn't realised that you could restore a system to a hard drive that doesn't contain a (broken) system to start with. Most cool.

[polymale]

Did you go to an SSD?

[claidheamhmor]

Sadly, no, though I would have loved an SSD as my primary drive; they're still too expensive.

I need space more than anything at the moment, so I cloned my 500GB drive to my 1.5TB drive, and added a new 2TB drive (only 5900rpm, but that's OK).

[polymale]

They're not THAT expensive, at least here in the US. I think about USD$1.5/Billion bytes, for a good one. 128GB will do quite nicely as a boot/app drive, I think.

[claidheamhmor]

Well, for me, a 128GB SSD will cost me $280, and a 2TB drive cost me $100. Given that I need space, not performance, and my budget was just over $100...