Thread: Regarding Hard Drives

Hello Dr CHIP, I want to know something regarding hard drives. I have an 80 GB PATA hard drive and I am planning to buy a new SATA 500 GB drive. I need to know how I can copy the data present on the 80 GB hard disk to my new hard disk. Thanks.

First attach the new hard drive to the motherboard using a SATA cable and power it up. Next, format the new hard drive and create the required partitions using Disk Management. To do this, right-click on 'My Computer' and select 'Manage' from the context menu. Select 'Disk Management' under 'Storage' and on the right pane you select the new hard drive and create the required partition size. Format it and make sure that you mark the first partition as 'Active' if you will be installing an operating system on it and need it to be bootable.

Once all this is done, exit the disk management utility and simply copy all your data from the old hard drive to the newer one using 'My Computer'. You can now use your older drive as a backup storage drive or remove it altogether. You can use third party tools such as 'TeraCopy' to safely and thoroughly transfer your files from one location to the other.

You can do a clone by using Seagate Acronis Disk Wizard. This DW only need one Seagate or Maxtor hd is present.
Download the iso image of Acronis DW. This utility is free for Seagate/Maxtor users.
Do a Google search of: Acronis-SeagateDW-1108188.iso

If decide build a new clean install of Windows, this DW can help you to partition/format the new hd.