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General discussion

Replacing a Hard Drive

Jan 12, 2011 1:39PM PST

My Dell Vista Home Premium system has two internal hard drives; the system disk (Disk 0) and one for data (Disk 1). I'm upgrading the data disk from a 750 GByte drive to a 1.5 TByte drive and I'm trying to get tips on the best and most speedy way to do this.

I do have an external USB 2.0 drive that's large enough to assist with this task, but I prefer to not use the USB drive; I'm thinking it would be slow as molasses. And although my entire system is backed up to Windows Home Server, I feel that replacing Disk 1 with the new hard drive and restoring the data from Windows Home Server would also be really, really slow.

I have an idea about how to proceed, but I'm not highly experienced with this type of thing. I was thinking I could temporarily replace my system disk with the new drive, and then boot to a utility CD (or possibly an installation disk), and then copy Disk 1 (my data disk) to the new hard drive.

If this method is advisable, my questions are:

(1) What type of disk would be best to boot from? If a special boot utility disk is preferable, please name it.

(2) How about partitioning and formatting the new drive?

(3) Which command is recommended for doing the copy? Being inexperienced, I was thinking I might use ROBOCOPY, but perhaps a special boot utility disk has a different command better suited for the job.

Of course, after the copy is completed, I'd just re-install my system disk and then move the new hard drive to the Disk 1 position, and then boot up.

Am I close? Thanks in advance. Your tips are appreciated.

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