Last night the hard drive in my wifes computer started to make that “click, click, click” sound that can only mean one thing – imminent head failure on the drive. Since the hard drive was only an 8GB hard drive it also offered a chance to “upgrade” to an old 20GB hard drive that I had sitting around.
I have always been a bit weary of upgrading the primary hard drive where the operating system is located. Previously I would have reloaded the OS from scratch. In this case I really didn’t want that sort of down time, so I started looking for alternatives.
In the end I found an extremely handy software package called Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0. The program is available for download with a 15-day free trial, which is all that I needed for this project, or you can purchase it on Amazon.
All that I can say is WOW. After installing the software, installing the new unpartitioned hard drive as a slave drive and restarting the computer it was seven easy steps to replacing the old hard drive with the new hard drive.
- Start up Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0
- Click on the “disk clone” button
- Selected “Automatic mode” which automatically sizes the partitions on the new hard drive
- Selected the source disk
- Selected the destination disk
- Clicked on “Proceed” and the computer restarted (on reboot Migrate Easy takes over and clones the drive)
- After Migrate Easy had done it’s thing I shutdown the computer, removed the old hard drive, installed the new hard drive as the primary master drive and restarted the system.
That was it. The computer restarted just fine and after one reboot when Windows detected a new primary hard drive we were up and running like nothing had ever gone wrong. If I had known it was this easy I probably would have upgraded the hard drive in her system a long time ago.
The software also works on Windows Server 2000 and Windows Server 2003, so I probably would have used it at work to upgrade some of our four-year old servers (which we are in the process of finally replacing right now).