Archive for DIY

How to Clone onto a Larger Hard Drive

February 17, 2009 at 8:05 pm · Filed under DIY, Of Interest

I recently upgraded my computer’s main hard drive. I didn’t want to just add more storage on a separate drive since much of my storage is taken up by Vista Media Center recordings. My music and videos are on a separate drive already. I just wanted a huge main drive.

So in the end, I’ve moved from a 250GB drive to a 1TB drive. Now cloning everything over wasn’t as easy as I had hoped, but it wasn’t too bad either. I thought I’d post a little bit about what I did and, which products I used to hopefully streamline someone else’s experience.

So let me list the stuff I used:

  • SATA Source Drive (250GB Seagate Barracuda)
  • SATA Destination Drive (1TB Western Digital Black)
  • Windows Disk Management
  • GParted
  • Easeus Disk Copy
  • InfraRecorder

Here’s the order of what I did:

  1. Added new drive physically in computer, changed nothing on original. With SATA drive you don’t even have to configure a jumper or anything. Just find an empty bay and plug in the power and data cables.
  2. Booted computer (Vista Home Premium in my case, though all of this would be the same on XP), and opened up the disk management tool.
  3. Activated the new hard drive.
  4. Downloaded both Easeus Disk Copy and GParted iso files, and burned them to CDs with InfraRecorder.
  5. Booted from the Easeus Disk Copy disk I just created. Copied the whole drive sector by sector to the new disk, existing paritions and all.
  6. Once Easeus is done copies, you have identical partitions on your new hard drive. There will also be the remainder of the free space on the new larger drive unallocated.
  7. Rebooted the computer with the GParted disk is the drive. Once GParted is up and ready to go, I select the main parition on the new drive and choose the “grow” option. I drag that partition to fill the rest of that “unallocated space”.
  8. Once that was done, I shut down the computer, disconnected the old drive, I swapped the data cables (not sure if this is necessary or not), and rebooted again.
  9. When windows is starting back up, it’ll want to run some disk checks. I let them finish, and the computer rebooted normally.

And that’s it. Doesn’t sound like it takes very long, but the copying, formating, and growing of partitions each took over an hour on my machine, which is pretty powerful.

All in all, I’m pretty happy since I don’t have to hunt down all that software all over again and re-do all my personal settings.

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