Harddrive swapping help

Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

I've got an old 500GB harddrive that's about to give up the ghost. I want to replace it with a new 4TB drive I just purchased, but would like to be able to just have all of the data on the old drive moved to the new drive and have the new drive take over with everything installed on it.


So, current drive is a secondary drive (D: ) and I want the new drive to be the new D:, with all the programs on the former drive now on the new one and working without having to reinstall or have the registry broken or any of that. Is there any easy way to do this?

I do have an external harddrive to use as backup.

Followup side question: Is there any real need to partition large drives into smaller sections these days?
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Ravenpoe said:
Is there any real need to partition large drives into smaller sections these days?
Click to expand...
Yes.
If your system can't handle the GUID partition table, it will not know what to do with a drive > 2GB. This is common with BIOS-based motherboards. UEFI ones should be fine.
Also, your old drive is probably one with 512b sectors, while your new drive probably is Advanced Format (AF) with 4k sectors. This means you can't just do a sector copy from the old disk to the new (unless the software properly compensates for that).

The simplest way is probably to make your 4TB your C: drive and install Windows on it fresh (because then you also don't have to worry about overlapping the sector boundary when you install), then convert your old drive to D: and drag over the data files you want to keep. This means having to reinstall everything, though.

If you want to try the clone option, build yourself a bootable clone flash drive or something using Acronis True Image (or comparable equivalent), boot to that, then clone from 500G to 4T. This won't resolve any of the partition table issues I mention, though.

--Patrick
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

PatrThom said:
Yes.
If your system can't handle the GUID partition table, it will not know what to do with a drive > 2GB. This is common with BIOS-based motherboards. UEFI ones should be fine.
Also, your old drive is probably one with 512b sectors, while your new drive probably is Advanced Format (AF) with 4k sectors. This means you can't just do a sector copy from the old disk to the new (unless the software properly compensates for that).

The simplest way is probably to make your 4TB your C: drive and install Windows on it fresh (because then you also don't have to worry about overlapping the sector boundary when you install), then convert your old drive to D: and drag over the data files you want to keep. This means having to reinstall everything, though.

If you want to try the clone option, build yourself a bootable clone flash drive or something using Acronis True Image (or comparable equivalent), boot to that, then clone from 500G to 4T. This won't resolve any of the partition table issues I mention, though.

--Patrick
Click to expand...
My mobo is UEFI, so the partition table shouldn't be a problem.

I don't want to make the 4TB drive my C: drive, because I have an SSD that I use almost solely for windows. I'll try the clone option, but I suppose worse case scenario I'll just backup everything and reinstall from the backups.

The new drive is an SSHD hybrid drive (yes, I know that's redundant, go tell the ATM machine), which I've never had any experience with. Anything special I should know about that? As far as I can tell, it works like a regular spinning platter drive, just with bigger and faster cache.
 
Tinwhistler

Tinwhistler

Ravenpoe said:
I've got an old 500GB harddrive that's about to give up the ghost. I want to replace it with a new 4TB drive I just purchased, but would like to be able to just have all of the data on the old drive moved to the new drive and have the new drive take over with everything installed on it.


So, current drive is a secondary drive (D: ) and I want the new drive to be the new D:, with all the programs on the former drive now on the new one and working without having to reinstall or have the registry broken or any of that. Is there any easy way to do this?

I do have an external harddrive to use as backup.

Followup side question: Is there any real need to partition large drives into smaller sections these days?
Click to expand...
Since you're swapping out D drives, I wouldn't go with the whole reinstall thing. Unless you just want that hassle/time sink.

Install the new hard drive (it'll come up as E or some other drive letter). Drag/copy all of the files from D to the new hard drive. Shut off the machine, and remove the old drive.

When you boot, the new drive may show up as D automatically. If it doesn't, open up Disk Management in Windows. Change the drive letter of the new drive to D, and reboot.

I've done this particular hard drive dance a lot over the years.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

You know, @Ravenpoe, I never noticed in the OP that you were talking about a secondary drive, and not your boot volume.
In that case, do what the last couple of people say and just drag-copy everything over to new drive #2, then remove old drive #2.
I prefer this method (secondary drive) myself for all the just-need-the-files-around stuff, for exactly the reasons Gas and Tin say.

As for SSHDs, they are usually just an 8GB SSD mated to a XXXTB HDD with built-in firmware that treats them together as one drive. Commonly accessed files get promoted to the SSD, anything that hasn't been touched in a while goes back to rotating storage. Intel's Smart Response technology can even take over the management of those two drives to deliver its own flavor of efficiency.

--Patrick
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

PatrThom said:
You know, @Ravenpoe, I never noticed in the OP that you were talking about a secondary drive, and not your boot volume.
In that case, do what the last couple of people say and just drag-copy everything over to new drive #2, then remove old drive #2.
I prefer this method (secondary drive) myself for all the just-need-the-files-around stuff, for exactly the reasons Gas and Tin say.

As for SSHDs, they are usually just an 8GB SSD mated to a XXXTB HDD with built-in firmware that treats them together as one drive. Commonly accessed files get promoted to the SSD, anything that hasn't been touched in a while goes back to rotating storage. Intel's Smart Response technology can even take over the management of those two drives to deliver its own flavor of efficiency.

--Patrick
Click to expand...
You know, I had originally thought about this possibility, but thought it couldn't possibly be that easy.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Ravenpoe said:
You know, I had originally thought about this possibility, but thought it couldn't possibly be that easy.
Click to expand...
If it's just a data drive, then it's nothing more than a bucket of files. It really is that easy. It's even easier than multiplying 3 times 3.

--Patrick
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Ravenpoe said:
You know, I had originally thought about this possibility, but thought it couldn't possibly be that easy.
Click to expand...
PatrThom said:
If it's just a data drive, then it's nothing more than a bucket of files. It really is that easy. It's even easier than multiplying 3 times 3.

--Patrick
Click to expand...
It really is. You only get into difficulties if you try to swap system drives, not data drives. Though, there are ways around that as well, but upgrading a data drive is cake.
 
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