Notebooks & Netbooks

[adm]

Hello, I have an Aspire 3682 WXMi laptop that I am upgrading.  I'd like to replace the 40 Gb hard drive with a larger capacity drive.  The trouble is there is only room for the current drive with it being a laptop.  If I get a new drive, how can I transfer the contents of the current drive to the new drive and still have the laptop boot and run normally?

Would it work if I installed the new drive and tried to use the recovery disks, as I have seen in some comments.

Advice welcome.

Thanks

[finlux]

Hi adm!

I think your laptop runs Vista?

What you can do is download a disk imaging tool - there are many good free ones available like Macrium Reflect, Paragon's Backup & Recovery amongst others. This will allow you to create an exact image of your old hard drive (usually stored on an external hard drive as a backup) which you can then transfer to your new disk. You often need to create a Boot Disk when re-installing. Read up on them - they are very easy to use, once you know what you're doing!

Alternatively, you can fit your new hard drive & use the recovery disks to install Windows from scratch (plus all the Service Packs/updates and your programs)!

If you have Windows 7 on your laptop, there is a built in imaging tool, which you'll find in Control Panel>Backup & Restore>Create a system image.

Hope this helps!

[miguel69]

the only problem with using finlux's alternate solution is your new drive will no longer have the hidden <PQservice> recovery partition and will not be able to create any new recovery disks or use alt+F10 to re-install.

I used Macrium Reflect in combination with Mini Tool Partition Wizard when I upgraded my Extensa 5230 from the installed 160GB drive to a 500GB drive. Macrium makes and restores the partitions (same size as original), while Mini Tool resizes the partitions so you can use the complete disk (do a little math before hand to decide how much space you want to dedicate to each partition).

also by going the imaging route you keep all your programs/data and settings as you had them (no lengthy re-installs / setups and tweeking to get back to the way you like it). you also get to keep the image files as an extra backup of your data.