How to successfully transfer my windows 7 OS and files from my old hard drive to a brand new 1TB hard drive?

Question

Basically I just installed windows 7 and finally finished setting everything up and installing all my software. How would I be able to transfer everything to a brand new 1TB hdd that my wife just bought me??? Any specific software or method? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Open up the tower and see how many slots you have...you might be able to get away with having both hard drives in there. That would be most ideal.



If not, though, go get yourself an external hard drive and move everything to it from your current setup, then install the new hard drive. Once that's in place, then transfer everything from the external to the new hard drive. As far as software and applications go, there's no way around it, you'll have to do a fresh install of those..

Answer 2

Ghosting the drive would probably be easiest. Ghost the existing one, mount the new one, restore the ghost (then you might have to call Microsoft because the OS is running on "the wrong computer" - it's a 5 minute process). There are many free ghosting programs out there, or you can use dd on any Linux disk (boot into Linux and run dd with if [input] being the Windows drive). There's a (very extensive) tutorial at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/learn-the-dd-command-362506/

Answer 3

Use Windows Easy Transfer to easily transfer your files: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Transferring-files-and-settings-frequently-asked-questions.



Cheers,

Tara

Windows Outreach Team

Answer 4

If you want to create a mirror image backup of your system so you can restore it, you can do it for free with Easeus Todo backup

http://www.todo-backup.com/

guide

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/3911/easeus-todo-is-a-free-backup-utility-for-windows/



or Macrium Reflect Free

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

video guides

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1cRq5SuFpY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRqsw4U8S60