A friend of mine the other day had their hard drive approaching death. It was grinding away and had a number of errors occurring. It was time to replace it.

After picking up a hard drive that was almost double the size, he gave it to me as I offered to install it.

There are two main things you need to do when upgrading or replacing your hard drive:

  • Installing the drive.
  • Copy over your data.

Installing the drive is the easy part. Just open up the case, find a spot that is available and the data and power cables can reach the drive from there. Plug everything in, turn on the computer and make sure it can detect the drive.

Duplicating Data From Hard Drive to Hard Drive

I had done this a few times before with Norton Ghost, but I couldn’t find a trial copy that would let me do it. It was time to look for something else.

I ended up downloading the basic version of HDClone. A free piece of software that does the trick.

Basically, you just download it and unzip it. There is an executable in the folder that when you run it, lets you create a floppy boot disk with the right programs on it.

I created my boot disk, put it in the PC I wanted to dupe the drive on and started it up. It brings you into the duplication program and after that it is just simple. Pick your source drive, your target drive, select the default options, and let it run.

When you are done, it will have duplicated the drive image onto your new drive.

When I started up the computer again, everything was like it was before. Unfortunately, the drive size was the same, even though the new drive had a much larger capacity. I then went in and created a new partition for the remainder of the drive and gave it a drive letter.