Replace HD in Laptop

[bradjedis]

Greetings,
i am wanting to replace my existing Hard drive in my laptop. I understand the mechanics of the physical Hard drive replacement, however I am not clear on how to move ALL of the contents to the new drive. I assume there are programs to facilitate this so I am asking for suggestions.


Many Thanks,
Brad

[tedshemyers]

Make an Image with a 3rd party app and restore to the new HD. I use Acronis True Image Home 2010 and 2011 on my PC's. Macrium Reflect is also a very well respected app for this.

A search in Windows Secrects forum shows many discussions on Imaging.

A similar search here shows many discussions as well.

An Image will allow you to make the change without any extra external hardware. Another method would be to clone the HD, but this would involve being able to connect both HD's at the same time.

[StuartR]

If you don't already have one then buy an external caddy that will let you connect your laptop drive to a USB or ESATA port on the laptop. This will enable you to use a tool like Acronis TrueImage to clone the disk. Easiest would probably be to put the new disk in the caddy and clone the old disk to the new one before you swap the drives.

[Bigaldoc]

.... so I am asking for suggestions.

I have used FREE Macrium Reflect with great success. But, it presumes you have an external disk on which to backup your current hard drive.

If you don't have that and your current drive is not dead, I'd suggest you invest in an external USB drive, use Macrium Reflect to make an image of your current drive.

Then, after the "logistics" of physically replacing the drive, it will be a simple job of restoring from the aforementioned image.

[John Gray]

I want to replace my existing Hard drive in my laptop....

I'm hoping to do this soon with my Toshiba Tecra M10 laptop: changing a Hitachi TravelStar 7K200 (7200 rpm, 200 GB) with a 7K750 (7200 rpm, 750 GB), when the latter become available (originally due 1Q2011!). All I have to check are the comparative power draws.

I hope to be going down the external USB caddy / Macrium Reflect route (but I'm not yet convinced that the Free edition allows resizing of partitions when cloning a system drive - this tutorial is for v5 (paid version)).

Let us know how you get on!

[StuartR]

...
I hope to be going down the external USB caddy / Macrium Reflect route (but I'm not yet convinced that the Free edition allows resizing of partitions when cloning a system drive - this tutorial is for v5 (paid version))...

If you put the new disk into the caddy and clone your existing partitions then this may not be a problem. Windows 7 Disk Manager can shrink and extend partitions without using any third party tools.

[John Gray]

Thanks, Stuart - I would probably use Easeus Partition Manager (or similar wording), which I've used before. The partitions are Windows 7, Data, and Windows XP, dual boot.

[bradjedis]

Thanks all for the replies. I do have Acronis True Image Home 2010, so when ready I shall give it a try!

[BobinTexas]

Add my vote for Acronis. I used a Western Digital Passport external HD. Acronis took care of partition resizing in the process. I don't remember the how-to details but reading the Acronis user manual will give them to you.

[John Gray]

As suggested elsewhere, I have managed to get my dual-boot, Windows 7 Pro 32-bit & XP Pro, laptop converted from a 200GB SATA drive to a 750GB SATA Advanced Format drive, using the Macrium Reflect Rescue Windows-PE bootable CD "clone partitions" feature.

On the way, I rearranged the order of the three partitions (eek!) and expanded the sizes of each to take advantage of the increased space. (One of the partitions was a Data partition, common to both OpSyses.)

The opportunities I encountered were as follows:

• the mechanism for cloning from the 200GB drive in a USB SATA caddy to the new 750GB drive in the laptop using Macrium Reflect is by no means intuitive to the new user - in fact, the opposite! I won't bore you with problems encountered, and I got there in the end, days and several 100GB copies later. When you understand the process, it works extremely well, and takes care of the MBR and the dual-boot requirements.
• The very plus side of Macrium Reflect cloning is that you can resize the partitions on the fly AND set the start sector of each Advanced Format disk partition to 1MB in from the start (old technology uses a start sector of 63, and some disk manufacturers, e.g. Western Digital, use 64 for AF disks). It doesn't seem to matter much, but for efficiency it needs to be a multiple of 8 (so both 64 and 2048 work). And since XP isn't Advanced-Format-aware you really need to start your XP partition as indicated.
• Since I had interchanged the position of the XP partition from number 1 on the 200GB disk to number 3 on the 750GB disk, I found that when I tried to boot XP it just sat there with a blank screen. I had to boot into Windows 7 and from there edit BOOT.INI in the XP partition to point to partition 3. Then it booted fine.
• However, the order of disks/disk letters in the XP system wasn't as I wanted, or as it had been on the old 200GB drive, so I had to play around with HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices to interchange the value-names of the DosDevices D: and E:.
• In Windows 7, I found there was a heap of error messages for the Search service and the Windows Defender service terminating multiply, and Windows Update wouldn't work. After a lot of Googling I found the suggestion to update the Intel Rapid Storage Technologies driver for my SATA disk controller (not even slightly obvious, that one!), and this proved to be the solution.

Let's hope I don't come across something new and "exciting"...

For those using another (or the same) disk imaging product to do cloning, I suggest that:
a) you do a CHKDSK of all disk partitions on the original drive before starting any cloning
b) you read what I've written above, to see if any of it might apply to you
c) you do the cloning to the new disk when booted from the cloning product's 'rescue' CD
d) you do the work when you are bright and bouncy, not tired after a hard day's work
e) you are very careful to leave the original disk untouched for a sensible period of time, Just In Case
Yes, obvious!

[ChrisGreaves]

Windows 7 Disk Manager can shrink and extend partitions without using any third party tools.

Stuart, thanks for this tip.
My neighbour just bought a 700GB laptop, so I can can easily split that into boot and data partitions and ding her for yet-another-breakfast at The Montreal Deli!
(I just carved 5GB out of my boot drive, then merged it back in again. Neat-oh!)