Hi, My Desktop is HP Compaq Presario, 4gb Ram, Vista Ultimate, HD's 500gb & 640gb also HP 150gb front removable Pocket media drive. All of my info including OS is currently on the 500gb HD (Drives,C,D & E total use 135gb). I have two questions namely : The 640gb HD is brand new & contains no info. How & can I transfer all info including OS etc onto 640gb HD leaving the 500 drive empty ? I will probably install Windows 7 and dual boot the 500gb drive at a later date. Secondly,I have backed up my 500gb drive to the HP 150gb pocket media drive. Is it possible to transfer all off the 150gb drive onto the 640gb drive which would leave the pocket media drive for backups & the 500gb for future Windows 7 ? Sorry if it appears to be a bit complicated, but I think it is !

Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks, Dennis.

Transfer All from 1 HD to another on same Desktop !

Dennis,

If you wish to transfer all the data from the 500Gb to the newer 640GB you will need a drive cloning program such as Ghost, Acronis, etc. Simply cutting and pasting it will not work.

The first question I would ask is why do you want to do all this? From your post you are only using 135Gb of the 500Gb so you have plenty of spare capacity. I assume that drive D & E are you data storage and C is you O/S? Unless the new drive s considerably faster or you are having problems with the old unit, you won't achieve much in the change.

If you want to set-up the 500Gb to have dual boots with Vista and W7 and are concerned about data loss, my recommendation would be to leave all the O/S and data on the 500GB and use the 640Gb as your backup storage area. There is a great freeware program called Cobian that you can download from

http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm

This easy to use software can be configured to automatically run a backup from the 500Gb to the 640Gb of any data that you wish to ensure is duplicated. it would even backup to the removable pocket drive if you wish. For my personal config, I run and auto back-up to an internal drive every week and a further back-up to an eSATA drive each fortnight.

In summary, IMHO you will not gain anything by transferring everything to the 640Gb HDD except experience in drive cloning.

Cheers Matt

Transfer All from 1HD to another on same desktop !

Hi Matt, Thanks for your quick reply & suggestions. Still haven't decided what action to take.

Regards, Dennis.