What do I do to the new hard drive when upgrading my storage hard drive in my Asus Aspire v5?

Wally78

I wish to replace my hard drive in my Acer Aspire V5 from a 250GB to a 1TB. What preparation do I do to old and new prior to the change. I have window 10 home. Wally78

aphanic

Preparations, as in digitally or physically?

Physically I'd recommend working on a stable surface, and if possible using something to ground you like an electrostatic bracelet. Not at all necessary, I've worked on machines of mine without any electrostatic protection whatsoever, but it's good practice, some electronics are sensible to that.

As for the hard drive exchange it's fairly straight forward, you'll see it when you're inside of the machine, but it just boils down to remove one and insert the other. Looking at your particular model in YouTube will surely show someone doing the procedure.

Digitally, I assume you'd want to preserve all of your stuff right? If so what you need to do is to clone the drive. You'd need an external enclosure or some way to connect the drive to the PC while the other one is also connected, and then a program to make the cloning. There are several, from open source and rather daunting for the uninitiated like Clonezilla, to paid offerings that are more or less "Next, next, next".

If your drive doesn't come with one, Western Digital and Seagate both bundle or have available at their sites versions of Acronis' backup solution for the purpose, I'd recommend Macrium's Reflect, the free offering offers disk cloning among other things.

After the disk is cloned, swapping one for the other would be enough. You may need to extend the main partition because you'll now have more space if the cloning program doesn't do it for you.

Alternatively, you may just replace the drives and install Windows fresh. For that there's a step by step tutorial I wrote in another thread: https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/607771/guide-how-to-install-windows-10-cleanly