Hard Drive Replacement Question

jcage · October 15, 2015, 1:24am

Hi, I have a Dell Dimension 8400 with a Western Digital HDD that’s a few years old. It has XPproSP2 on it, all as my C drive. In an effort to replace it, I’m wanting to install another hard drive as D in an available internal bay, and hopefully do a mirror image of my existing C to that new D hard drive.

Following this, I’d remove and retire my old C drive and basically doing a rename of D to C, placing me pretty much where I am now but with a new hard drive. So what I’m looking at is replacing my existing drive with one that’s probably twice the size, having the new drive hopefully ALL partitioned as C and having all my data from my existing drive moved to this new C (hard drive) when I’m through.

Does Western Digital have a software package that would be a best solution for this project? TIA

jcage · October 15, 2015, 2:46am

Didn’t mention this in my original post but my existing HDD is a WD 160 SATA and I’m looking to replace with a WD 500 SATA. I was hoping to plug the new drive into an HDD docking station and was looking at a

Diablotek EN3525D Hard Drive Dock - 2.5"/3.5" SATA to USB 2.0

for this purpose. So the question to WD tech folks, if I clone in the docking station, I should be able to just remove the existing 160 from the computer and install the 500 from the docking station and be off and running, correct? Thanks, John

David_Pierson · October 15, 2015, 2:46am

Hi John,

I’m guessing the reason no one’s responded is that this is really a Windows question. Your brand of drive would not really have any effect I reckon. In general cloning drive-to-drive will work providing you get every file and set up the MBR so that the boot sectors are correct. Google for boot sector cloning stuff like that.

Why not pop in to the Windows Secrets Lounge and have a look around, maybe this has come up there.

This is not a bad thread to start on …

lounge.windowssecrets.com/index.php?showtopic=777348

For my money, after a Windows installation has a few years on it, I prefer to start afresh to get the performance back