Clone a Hard Drive

I have bought a new computer, but I am going to just swap out the drive from my old one to the new one. Does anyone know of a way I can clone a 160 gig drive to a 100 gig drive. There is only about 85 gig on the drive I have now.

[camiller]

Is there a reason you think this will work? When the OS was installed on the old computer it had to detect and install drivers for the motherboard chipset and on board peripherals. (If you have ever built a computer from parts the motherboard usually comes with a driver disk) If you simply clone that old drive to the drive in the new PC it is basically not going to work unless the new computer had virtually exactly the same motherboard/chip set/firmware. You will likely still have to reinstall the OS, which means since the registry will be empty you will have to reinstall all your application software as well.

You are much much better off simply installing your apps and transferring your data over.

Unless the new computer IS the same hardware as the old one, in which case never mind.

I am just going to a newer computer from the same company. I have done this before in the past. The only reason I want to do this now is because I am not sure I still have all of my software, and need a mirror drive in case this fails to work and screws this drive up.

[camiller]

You could try SystemRescueCD, it has a disk imaging tool although I generally use it just for backup purposes, I havn't tried restoring a image to another system. There is also Macrium Reflect Free, I haven't used it myself but it runs under windows rather than needing a boot disk.

[dunng]

Hiren's BootCD...

[Volt]

Originally Posted by camiller

Is there a reason you think this will work? When the OS was installed on the old computer it had to detect and install drivers for the motherboard chipset and on board peripherals. (If you have ever built a computer from parts the motherboard usually comes with a driver disk) If you simply clone that old drive to the drive in the new PC it is basically not going to work unless the new computer had virtually exactly the same motherboard/chip set/firmware. You will likely still have to reinstall the OS, which means since the registry will be empty you will have to reinstall all your application software as well.

You are much much better off simply installing your apps and transferring your data over.

Unless the new computer IS the same hardware as the old one, in which case never mind.

While you might be able to fight it and get it to work.... Not worth the issues. Much better with a clean install. Why have an old clogged up registry, drivers that will not match up, and a slow old load on a new system. Well worth the effort to load fresh. I have done a few of you HD swaps for people and even at $30 an hour I refuse to do any more, not worth the $$ for the headaches it brings.

[skullnrose]

If all you are wanting to do is clone the drive the easiest way to do this that I know of is picking up a cheap hard drive enclosure and using a trial version of Acronis migrate easy (you only get a 15 day trial) it's pretty much fool proof. If like the above poster said you are trying to install your old hard drive with the old bios info into a totally different computer....Good luck.

[moosie]

Hirens 9.8