Hello, I have a 40gb hard drive in my computer right now. I'm going to go buy a 120gb hard drive. I have alot of saved information and don't want to lose it, nor reinstall windows Me or all the programs I have installed, Could I hook the new hard drive inplace of the cd-rom, and copy the whole C directory to the new one, than shut the computer off and take out the old hard drive and place in the new, or do I need a special program the clone a hard drive.....Let me know...Thanks....Adam

Ok First things first !!!

How old is your computer ??

By the info you have given above suggests that the bios will not be able to handle the 120 drive.

Is the 120 drive and 8meg cache drive or not ??

If it is you will need to reload !!

You will need to get a second party partitioning tool to set up the new drive as DOS may have issues with the 120 gig drive.

But first you need to determine if the bios on the board can come with the 120. What brand and model is it ?? Does the manufacturer have a bios update to correct this problem ???

Hope that helps.

Regards

IF IT AINT BROKE, DONT FIX IT

ada1984, IMHO, you're doing more work than necessary. I can understand the desire for more room. What if instead of just one huge drive, you have several smaller ones with the same total capacity? If you simply partition the new drive into more manageable chunks and install as seperate drives, you can then move whatever you like to the new storage in order to free up existing space on 'C'. That should provide you with the best of both worlds, more storage space + ease of handling of smaller units (defrag faster, etc.). You can have an almost unlimited # of drives, each with a different identifying letter designation (drive D,E,F,G, etc.).
HTH.
Ed in Texas.

There used to be an 8 GB hard drive limit imposed by some older BIOS. However, as you already have a 40 GB this is unlikely to be the case.

There is a 64 GB limit in fdisk you should be aware that requires an update to fdisk which Microsoft has issued. Read more about this on my website (Homepage link) under the section titled "Working with Large sized Hard Drives, especially 127 GB or bigger"

To answer your question. In short yes you should be able to do that.

If it is a new hard drive, then most hard drive manufacturers have a free utility to do exactly what you are trying to do. That is their way of generating more hard drive sales.

If you do not have this utility then you can use Norton Ghost, Drive Image, Acronis True Image, and various other drive copying utilities to do what you want. Most of these are not free though.

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☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

P.S.

Having re-read your question, I think I may not have answered entirely correctly by saying "yes you should be able to do that".

A straight copy of files from one hard drive to another will NOT transfer the Windows OS correctly to the other drive. You do need a special program and this is what I am talking about in my earlier post.

___________________________________________
☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

I have a Dell Optiplex G1 from 1999, I'm going to upgrade to a powerleap slotwonder 1.4ghz celeron processor, right now it has a 400mhz celeron, the bios is A07, from what I saw in the dell forums that these computers have no no limits with the hard drive, Bios does not read the correct size of the drive, but as long as windows does your fine. Let me know if you know how to copy the whole OS, installed programs, and files....Adam

get the Ultimate Boot CD. It contains 4 different hard disk cloning tools (all freeware).

It is a 70 MB download. Alternatively these are the 4 on the CD which you could download individually:

Hard Disk Cloning Tools:
HDClone (Free Edition)
g4u
PC INSPECTOR clone maxx
XXCOPY

___________________________________________
☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.