[anotheruser2]

Hello,

My laptop has a SATA 160GB hard drive and is Dell Vostro 1510 with Windows Vista. About 130GB out of 160GB are used.
The other laptop has SATA 250GB hard drive and is Toshiba L505D with Windows Vista (I might have model number slightly off). About 60GB out of 250GB are used.

I want to swap the hard drives.
How can I do this without having to re-install everything or buying expensive stuff?
If I just swap hard drives physically:
1. I will have to re-install every program and apply the registry hacks and all that stuff again (this will take a looong time).
2. My Dell hotkeys might stop working, as well as the Toshiba hotkeys.
Or, so I think. I have the installation DVDs

The tools I have:
-external hard drive 80GB
-attached to same network router (but I do not know how to use it to transfer files)

I'm thinking that I would clone my 160GB hard drive and move it onto the 250GB hard drive and vice versa. How to do this?

Thanks in advance.

PS: The 160GB drive is partitioned by 60GB and about 100GB.

[DaveBurnett]

No you cannot just swap the drives.
What you should do is:
Partition the 250 Gb drive into 2 partitions, without destroying the 60Gb data.
Make it 175Gb and 75Gb.
Clone the 60Gb into the 75Gb on the same drive.
Clone the 130Gb to the 175Gb overwriting the 60Gb there.
Clone the 60Gb to the 160Gb drive
Expand the 175Gb to fill the drive.

[LinuxHacker]

you could PURCHASE the new version of norton ghost and make an image of your one hard drive and pull it down onto the other. the newer version somehow goes around the hardware abstraction layer.

[aka Brett]

Originally Posted by DaveBurnett

No you cannot just swap the drives.
What you should do is:
Partition the 250 Gb drive into 2 partitions, without destroying the 60Gb data.
Make it 175Gb and 75Gb.
Clone the 60Gb into the 75Gb on the same drive.
Clone the 130Gb to the 175Gb overwriting the 60Gb there.
Clone the 60Gb to the 160Gb drive
Expand the 175Gb to fill the drive.

And you didnt even use the external

[aka Brett]

Originally Posted by LinuxHacker

you could PURCHASE the new version of norton ghost and make an image of your one hard drive and pull it down onto the other. the newer version somehow goes around the hardware abstraction layer.

Wont it be slow difficult and cumbersome?
I bought ghost once..i used it to have a recovery partition...when I wanted to reformat I would boot the cd..point to my image and wait..and I do mean wait..my cd rom had to take a beating for 3 hours..while the hdd copied the files over from D to C...about 5 gigs.....Why it needed to keep my cd rom spun up at max I have no idea

The built in recovery partition before that could have it done in a little over an half hour.

The one on my last machine could do it in 18 minutes on vista..

I recently cloned some drives with seagate tools..{Acronis} I was very impressed with the speed and how easy it was...WD also has the same tool now as well.

There are not alot of Nortons fans on here

[LinuxHacker]

ghost doesnt take that long. depends on disk I/O i suppose.

[aka Brett]

The version I had was about 5 years ago..it was terrible.
It is what was on the shelf though at the store...that was before I started shopping for good free stuff lol

[DaveBurnett]

I use both Ghost AND Acronis TI.
I have a multiboot disk that has 7 primary partitions on it (any 4 at one time) so I need to use Ghost to do a sector copy so it picks up the hidden stuff. I also use it for forensic copying of disks prior to trying data recovery.
For day to day partition backups I use Acronis TI

[anotheruser2]

Originally Posted by DaveBurnett

No you cannot just swap the drives.
What you should do is:
Partition the 250 Gb drive into 2 partitions, without destroying the 60Gb data.
Make it 175Gb and 75Gb.
Clone the 60Gb into the 75Gb on the same drive.
Clone the 130Gb to the 175Gb overwriting the 60Gb there.
Clone the 60Gb to the 160Gb drive
Expand the 175Gb to fill the drive.

Thanks for the quick response!
How would I go about doing this?
Which program should I use?
How do I move the 130GB to the 175GB (vista will have to be shut down or else I can't do this right)?

[DaveBurnett]

What make are your drives?.

EaseUS partition manager is free for personal use and is very like Partition Magic

If you have a Maxtor, Seagate, or Western Digital drive in your machine you can get their disk utility for free. ( actually Acronis True Image)

[anotheruser2]

I'm not sure, but it should not matter right? Oh wait, I know the 160GB is a SATA and I am pretty sure the 250GB is also.
But Vista (installed on both computers) has a partition manager that I have used before.

EDIT: The 160GB is WDC WD according to device manager in windows.

[aka Brett]

I can vouch for the seagate tools being easy and fast.....Very easy
Wd as stated also has the same tool.

[DaveBurnett]

If it is WDC you can go to their site and download the utility.
see http://www.techsupportalert.com/cont...ree-caveat.htm

[anotheruser2]

Thanks.

I checked the other 250Gb laptop and it is using a Toshiba HDD2H24 250GB SATA hard drive 5400rpm.

This means I can't use the WD program according to their website:
"Drive Cloning - Copies the source drive to a new WD drive, leaving all data on the source drive."

Wait does this mean that I need to mount my SATA laptop hard drive into a desktop computer? Is this possible? If so, my desktop is 250GB I think.

[DaveBurnett]

All they do is check that you have a WD drive in your system and you can download and use it as you wish.