mos2k

So as some of you may remember I have a dying 750GB Seagate 7200.12 hardrive. I'm going to buy a 1TB WD drive soon.

I was wondering, Since I'm going to remove the bad hard drive, is it possible to just copy and paste the entire folders from the dying one to the new one and then removing the dying hard drive and changing the drive letters to the previous one.

Will my installed applications work that way? I don't want to go through the hassle of uninstalling and installing the applications again.

If there is a better way to do it please by all means let me know. any feedback is welcomed. Thank you!

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caqde

You would have to do a mirror image of the drive, otherwise things won't work the way you would like. But that might cause issues due to the size differences in the drives as you would have 250GB in unused space on the new drive although you may be able to create a new partition for the unused space.

Although depending on the extent of the damage on the old drive I may not recommend using such a tool, and another issue could arise if your new drive is using the new advanced format which would mean that cloning would misalign all of the sectors on the drive causing it to be very very slow.

Anyways wiki has a list of such tools some of which are free -> Comparison of disk cloning software - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Good luck with recovering your data.

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Tyrsonswood

Easus partition manager has a great "drive copy wizard" I use it all the time when switching hard drives.... It's free, fast, stable and has never made a bad copy.

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mos2k

Okay.. so it will make the drive the exact as my current one with the same partitions but wouldn't it be a hassle to have so many partitions considering it is a 1TB drive.

But my REAL question is when I have cloned my drive and when I remove my dying drive. Will the installed applications work like nothing has changed?

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Tyrsonswood

As far as the OS and applications working.... Yes. Unless you want to put applications in partitions that they are not on now..... Nothing makes that work automatically.

When you do a drive clone with Easus, you get a step where you can resize the partition to fill up the new drive if it is larger..... Say your 750 is one partition and you copy to the 1TB, after you select the 750 as source and the 1TB as destination there is a step to make the 1TB all one partition. This doesn't effect your files or OS. If you want the extra space to be a second partition then skip this step and setup the new partition in Windows afterwards.

I've used this a lot lately with XP and Win7 and never had any issues.... Win7 even automatically activates without issues. (once I tell it to, it's automatic, Win7 is kinda stupid)

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YnHDaRkMaN

Yeah, just clone the drive using a good drive cloning software and you're good to go.

Recently I went from a 250GB SATA I drive to a 1TB SATA II (big change I know lol), used the software that came bundled and had absolutely no problems, it even let me change the partitions size as I wanted.

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OldBuzzard

Most of the drive mfgs have software that will clone your old drive to the new drive. It used to come in the box with new retail drives. Most likely they just point you to a D/L site on their page now.

HMMMMM....just looked, and it looks like WD is using a version of ACRONIS True Image:
WD Support
Seagate has DiskWizard, which also seems to be a version of ACRONIS:
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.js...00dd04090aRCRD

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When looking for a reason as to why things go wrong, never rule out sheer STUPIDITY

Tyrsonswood

I used to use the Seagate "DiskWizard" and Maxtor's tool before that and both being based on Acronis it wants to (and does) put a resident Acronis program that runs in the background. This is not temporary, it wants to be there forever and is a waste of resources. Hassle to remove later too.

Easus does none of that cr@p.......

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mos2k

No, I Know that.. I only want the installed apps to work. Thanks Tyrson

Thank you

I have the paragon partition magic Professional edition, So I guess I'll use that.. For now I'm moving towards a impending exam month.. I'm so dead.. I want to be on vacations and play games and Tennis...

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OldBuzzard

NO, NO, NO, and a THOUSAND TIMES NO!!!!!

When working with Windows 7, use ANYTHING other than Partition Magic.

When testing the first version of HyperOS that supported Windows 7, one of the first things I, and all of the other beta testers for HyperOS found, is that WIN 7 absolutely hates PPM.

With HOS you run multiple OSs, each in it's own partition. Now, with HOS if you are starting from a bare drive, you install your first OS, and then re-partition your HDD to the number/size of partitions that you want. The earlier editions of HOS used PPM for setting up your HDD for this, and it worked quite well.

Once HOS started supporting 7, we found that if we installed XP or Vista first, and used PPM to re-partition our HDDs everything would work OK. However, once 7 was installed, or if it was the first OS installed, using PPM to re-partition the HDD would hose all of the partitions, and you would have to re-format and start all over.

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When looking for a reason as to why things go wrong, never rule out sheer STUPIDITY

Tyrsonswood

majorgeeks.com/EASEUS_Partition_Master_Home_Edition


^^^ THIS ^^^

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mos2k

SAVED AGAIN...!!! Thank you for saving me from a sh*tload of frustration ... .. I sir bow to you..thank you will use anything except partition magic.

I.. will... use it now... I'm scared of losing my data so i'll use this one.

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mos2k

Okay.. Heres the Update I tried Easeus and I SIMPLY LOVE IT!!!

Everything went without a Hitch.. Thank you all for Helping me out..

You people Are the best!!

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Tyrsonswood

Cool, Man.... glad you got it sorted.

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