I have a 180gb sata hard drive and im getting a faster 350gb drive. I would like to make the 350gb drive my main one and use the 180gb as storage for backups and such. What do i need to do to transfer selected files, but not settings or anyting to the new 350gb from the 180gb? I dont have any dvds only 2 1gb flash drives. Also, what do i need to do to set the 350gb as my primary drive and treat the 180gb as spare storage (Im clean reinstalling the main one and the spare one if i have to) do i have to set master and slave? how?
Seagate,maxtor and there might be others have a disc tool that you can download that images your old hard drive to the new one and then once your reboot you can wipe your old one.
With main drive I suppose you mean have windows installed on it? I don't really see the advantage of doing so (having the larger disk as backup makes more sense to me) but anyway, you can proceed like this:
- take out the 180 GB disk
- boot with the windows CD and install the OS on the 350 GB disk
- put the 180 GB disk back in and copy over any files to the 350GB disk, then reformat the 180 GB disk to take off windows.
yea you basically just want to put in the new HDD and take out the old, install windows ect. The add your older HDD(internally) and copy and past over your files. If you want to set one master and the other slave either do it by pins on the back of the HDD or in BIOS
I would just install the OS on the 350GB drive, put the old drive in slave, let the OS detect the drive and put the settings in it (if any) in the device manager, assign a drive letter (usually done automatically) and copy the files. But in case you have time: put the old drive in, start the PC and let the OS load, backup everything to DVD's and index it. Then, install the new drive, put the old one as slave, install the OS in the main drive, delete the content from the old drive and copy the files you want bad to the old HDD, ready for usage as storage device now. It's a bit of a hassle, but this way you got a perfect backup on DVD's while you are doing this. In case you don't have a burner: buying the burner and some discs costs max. $100, and you get a nice backup in return, plus you can use it later to make backups of the new data.
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