How do I swap out my C drive?

[rrw4rusty]

Hello,

I guess I need a way to copy my current C drive to a new drive so that the new drive can replace the C drive. Or perhaps there’s some alternate way to replace the C drive with a newer and larger drive. I’m running Windows 7 Home Premium 64.

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Rusty

 

[Mychael]

Welcome Rusty, The way I personally do it which works well for me is that I purchased a standalone HDD cloning dock station. It's totally independent of the computer and has it's own power supply.
You remove your "c" drive from the computer case, put it in the 'source' slot of the copy machine and your new drive in the 'destination or target' slot, press copy and away you go. Carbon copy.

A couple of things to note. You target drive must be equal or greater then the physical size/capacity of your source drive, you will loose any and all pre-existing data on your target drive, it wont work with Solid State Drives.

I have a case for quick release drive removal so it's easy for me and I just use the copy machine about once a month or so to make up to date replicas of my system drive. That way if something bad happens to my HDD I'll never be more then a month behind in my data/settings.

 

[Nibiru2012]

There is a free program called Clonezilla which should do what you want with no problems at all.

http://clonezilla.org/

 

[rrw4rusty]

Thanks for the info! I rarely need to clone a drive so clonezilla looks like a good choice. Let you know...

Rusty