How to Upgrade Your Tiny Hard Drive to a Spacious New One and Keep Your Data Intact
You're
planning on upgrading your hard drive, but there's one small problem:
How do you get your data from the old hard drive to the new one, without
reinstalling everything? Here's a step-by-step guide to seamlessly
transition to a new drive.
Photo by Jeff Kubina.
If you've
bumped up against the limits of your small, old hard drive over and
over, it may be time to upgrade. In some instances, all the desktop user
may need to do is install a second (or third) hard drive for a little
more space. But that's not always an option, especially for laptop
users. The solution: Clone your old drive—complete with your operating
system and all your data—to a new, bigger drive.
For the
purpose of this article, we're going to start after the point at which
you've physically installed the hard drive—there's just a couple of
screws and a cable, after all, but if you still need some help you can
check out our guide to installing a hard drive for a primer on the basic technique.
Below,
we'll highlight a few tools that can help you clone your old hard drive
to a new one (and choose a favorite we'll use), detail a few of the
finer points for getting started on a laptop or desktop computer, then
guide you through the cloning and upgrading process.
Options for Cloning Your Drive
To upgrade
your hard drive without reinstalling everything, you'll need to use a
utility to make an exact copy, or clone, from the old hard drive to the
new one. A number of commercial tools will do this for you, and even
some free Windows utilities can make a copy of your drive while your PC
is running. For example, see our guide to using DriveImageXML to hot image your PC's hard drive,
which is an excellent tool for making a backup. The problem, however,
is that it doesn't create a true clone of the drive, since you'd still
have to reinstall the Windows bootloader using a repair CD if you wanted
to boot into your cloned drive.
The bigger
problem, particularly if you're upgrading a laptop, is that you need to
have a copy of Windows already running for most of the free utilities to
work; most laptops can only have one drive hooked up at a time. In this
case, your best free option is the Linux-based Clonezilla Live CD, which streamlines the process of imaging your drive to an external drive or even a shared folder on another PC.
Upgrading a Desktop Hard Drive
When it
comes to upgrades, desktops are always going to be easier to deal with
since you can easily get in there and move cables around, and in this
case, because you can hook both drives up at the same time, greatly
simplifying the whole process.
What you'll
want to do is hook the new drive up—since we'll be using a boot CD, you
can save a step by plugging the new hard drive into the primary slot,
and move the old one to the secondary—so once the cloning is done you
won't have to do anything else.
Upgrading a Laptop Hard Drive
Method One:
While some laptops have the capability to swap out the optical drive
and add another hard drive, it's not common, so you'll need to use an
external USB hard drive, or potentially another PC with a shared folder,
to save an image of the current drive. Once you've created the image,
you can install the new drive, and then restore the image onto the new
hard drive.
Method Two:
Your other option is to install the new hard drive, use an external USB
to SATA adapter to hook the old drive to the laptop, and then clone the
drives that way. This eliminates the extra step of copying to a
secondary device, but requires spending a little extra money for
something you might not use very often—so you might want to borrow one
from a geek friend that does PC repair (or just use the first method
above).
How to Clone Your Drive with Clonezilla
Now we're ready to clone our old drive to our new one. The first thing you'll need to do is download a copy of the Clonezilla ISO image, and then use a software like ImgBurn
to burn it to a CD. For best results, you should grab the Alternative
Ubuntu-based version, which has better compatibility with modern
hardware.
Once you've
got the live CD burnt to a disc, restart your computer, boot off the
CD, and accept all the default settings until you get to the screen
where you can choose to create an image of the drive, or sync one drive
directly to another drive. If you have both drives connected, you can
simply use the device to device option, otherwise choose to create an
image.
Assuming
you chose to create an image, you will need to choose where the image
will be stored, whether on an external drive, SSH server, or you can use
the SAMBA option, which will allow you to connect to a Windows shared
folder to store the image. Either of the latter two options will step
you through a set of wizard screens to help you get hooked up to the
server.
If you
chose the local device option, you'll be prompted to select the drive
that you want to save the image on. Make sure that this drive is
formatted with NTFS or a Linux filesystem—you should not use a drive
with FAT32 since the 4GB maximum file size will probably cause the
cloning to fail.
At this
point you'll be prompted to either save or restore a disk or
partition—you should always use the disk image option here, and not
single partitions, as you need the bootloader to stay intact on the new
drive to make sure Windows is bootable. Since we're making an image file
here, choose the first option, and follow through the wizard to select
the drive and give it a name.
Creating
the cloned drive image will take a while, but at the end you should see
the option to shutdown or restart your PC. Laptop users, it's time to
swap out the old hard drive with the new one, so we can restore the
cloned image. If you did a direct disk to disk copy (which you probably
did if you're on a desktop), you can skip the next step ("Finishing
Up").
Restoring the Cloned Image
Now that
you have the new hard drive installed in the PC, boot off Clonezilla
again, follow through all of the same prompts until you get to the
screen where you have to choose to save or restore the image. Choose the
restoredisk option, choose the image to restore from (it's the one we
just created above), and then choose the new disk that you want to
overwrite.
You'll be
prompted twice to make sure that you really want to overwrite the drive
(make sure you've got the right drive installed—that is, the new, big,
empty one), and the restore process will take a while. Once it's all
done, you can remove the CD and reboot the PC from your new drive,
directly into Windows.
Bonus: The Expert Linux Method
If you're a
little more comfortable with Linux, there's any number of command-line
tools like partimage or dd that can get the job done easily from a Linux
Live CD. For instance, to copy one drive to another using dd, simply
use the following command, substituting sda and sdb for your source and
destination device names.
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
To create an image file instead, you can use a command similar to the following one suggested by reader @zarekthenerd, substituting sda for your source drive name, and modifying the path to your external hard drive:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/EXTERNAL/backup.img bs=4096
Once you've created the image, you can swap out your hard drive, boot from the live CD again, and then reverse the command:
dd if=/media/EXTERNAL/backup.img of=/dev/sda bs=4096
Finishing Up: Boot Up and Expand the Partition
Now that
we're all done cloning the drive, all you need to do is boot up your PC,
wait for Windows to finish figuring out that you have a new drive and
installing the device drivers, and then we're ready to fix the one
remaining problem—the current drive partition is the same size as the
old drive.
If you're
using Windows 7 or Vista, open up Windows Disk Management through the
Start menu search box, or by right-clicking on Computer and choosing the
Manage option. Once there, right-click the partition and choose Extend
Volume to make the partition fill the entire disk.
At this point you should be able to head into Computer and see that your new hard drive is now nice and spacious.
If you're
using Windows XP, you're going to have to take another route (it doesn't
have a robust, built-in partition manager); you could choose to create
another partition, or if you want to resize your primary partition, you
can boot from the GParted Live CD and make the changes in there by clicking on the partition and using the Resize/Move button.