New hardrive

[forklifter]

I am thinking of putting a new hard drive in my old computer the 8 gig is to small I am thinking of a 30 gig 7200 rpm is there any way i can put all the information from my old harddrive to my new one or should I just leave the old hardrive in I would like to have the 7200 as my main drive is why I am asking

[gcutler]

Do you have a CD-RW drive? If so you can get something like Symantec's Ghost (lots of other programs like it) and it will make an image of your 8GB drive to several CD-RWs, you remove the 8 gig, put in the new drive and restore the CD-RWs using your Ghost Restore disk (Just have it use entire drive for partition and not only 8GB partition of image taken)

The program may allow you to ghost directly from Drive 0 to Drive 1 without using CD-RWs and just remove the 8GB drive, but I haven't done that.

[Bogy]

What brand is the 8 gig, and what brand are you planning on installing? I always use Western Digital, and the software they include transfers everything from the old drive to the new drive. You just install the new drive as the master, the old drive as the slave, and the software does the rest. I've probably done it this way 10 times without a hitch.

[forklifter]

My old drive is a maxtor and I am going to use a 40g WD will the WD transfer the old data from a maxtor

[Bogy]

I think it will, although it likes best to work with its own kind. :D I would try it first, and only look at alternatives if it won't work with the Maxtor drive. The software WD includes will not set up another brand as master, but I believe it will read from another brand to set up a WD as the new master.

[Ric]

Personally, just keep 'em both and make the new disk a slave. Clean out the old drive and make it applications only and store music, movies, docs, internet temp files, etc. on the new drive.