Installing a new Hard Drive?

[r_j]

my Father in law has one of those budget emachines and would like it to run a little faster? I Ive already maxed out the ram to 2gb. Its running a little smoother. But I also heard that he could install a new faster internal sata hard drive as his main drive ? I believe he has a few sata connectors available. My question is there some way to transfer everything from the old hard drive to the new one? Or would I simply have to reinstall everything again? His computer didn't come with a OS disk, we had to create some when we first got the computer. Could we just use these disks on the new hard drive? Would I have to change anything else in the BIOS (boot order). And would i need to format the old drive to use it just as extra space?

[NightTran]

I would transfer all the data, and not the program to the new sata drive then would make a lot easier just my thought need to check with Chewy

[Chewy]

arrange all his data in easily accessible folders(maybe even on the root directory of the drive) whereever

install the new drive and use xp? disk management to partition it into a system partition and a data partition, set the system partition active

you can either try and make a copy of the data then from the old setup or wait till your reload windows and all his programs after switching the new drive to the old drive's cable

[r_j]

would the recovery disks that we created when we first set up the computer work to reinstall the OS (XP) to the new hard drive?

[Chewy]

they should work, after all hard drives die, they don't have specific drivers for each one

you can experiment rather safely by switching drives and putting the old one back in if it doesn't work

never assume

[browneye]

I have used Norton Ghost many times to "clone" drives. There is a stand alone version that fits on a floppy. You plug in both drives, and boot to the floppy, It takes you down the garden path very easily It helps to know exactly what size the source disk is reported to Ghost before hitting OK, that way you don't copy the blank disk to the old one. Most disk manufactures provide a utility to do the same, check the web sites.