Gaming Replacing old hard drive

[RebelX]

Oh dear. Just earlier today, I realized I had 3 GB left on my 140GB hard drive. It's time for a new hard drive. So, after doing some searching on newegg, I came across this hard drive from newegg. It has all the space I need.

However, I am skeptical on how to transfer the contents from my current hard drive to the new one. I looked around and came across this. Is the transfer just easy as connecting the new hard drive and using the "Files and Settings Transfer Wizard" under System Tools on Windows XP?

Any answers are appreciated. Also, please tell me if those choices of hardware are not a good choice.

 

[FAST6191]

Firstly a 140 gig hard drive probably means IDE interface (I can not be certain without model numbers or a scan) while that drive uses a SATA interface (a newer standard). There are adapters ( http://www.firewire-1394.com/ide-sata-hard...pter-bridge.htm ) but I strongly advise against using them for anything other than forensics or similar (in which case there are USB/firewire things far better at it). IDE drives are still readily available though so no need to worry.
If you know all this and I am talking nonsense please ignore it.

Transfer. If it is an unencrypted drive (if you do not know it most likely is not) then it is a case of copy and paste like you would a USB drive/CD/network/..... there are some problems though depending on what you want to do.

Windows. For matters of DRM and whatnot Windows is locked to a certain setup and too much change necessitates a reinstall. Whether it will happen here is up to debate (if it is just the drive and you have not done much (graphics card/ram/cpu/... change) then you should be OK).

Windows files: as you probably know XP stores things all over the place (my documents is actually something like c:\documents and settings\[user name]\My Documents\ and it only gets worse).

My suggestion run the new drive as a second drive and stick with the original how it is. Better yet buy an external drive, it makes giving stuff to others far easier and works just as well.

 

[RebelX]

I can guarantee you it is a SATA drive, because it goes into a SATA port. It says 160GB on the label but on my computer it says 144GB. And I can't have a second drive because my computer is a Dell XPS 200, which is not a conventional PC, and I don't have any more SATA ports on the motherboard, unless you want to install one for me.

So, if I buy that USB to SATA adapter, can I just use that wizard or Arconis True Image (I am sorry that I didn't mention I had it before) to make the new hard drive work exactly as my current one?

EDIT: I also have read some stuff about this "137GB barrier" or something like that. What does this mean?

 

[fischju]

The easiest thing you can do is keep the drive in your PC where it is, buy an external drive, and copy all of your data to it (music, movies, ect) Leave the internal drive just for Windows and installed programs.

 

[xcalibur]

My suggestion run the new drive as a second drive and stick with the original how it is. Better yet buy an external drive, it makes giving stuff to others far easier and works just as well.

this.

 

[DSGamer64]

You are best off setting the new drive as Slave and setting it up from there. It is a simple plug and play really. Depending on the age of the motherboard will depend on whether or not you can use a SATA drive, odds are it is IDE since SATA is more commong amongst computer at most 2 years old unless they are custom built ones. The original HDD should be set to master, so it should be simple to set the new one to slave, then your computer should automatically recognize the new drive and you can format it and set the file system to NTFS no sweat.

 

[RebelX]

You are best off setting the new drive as Slave and setting it up from there. It is a simple plug and play really. Depending on the age of the motherboard will depend on whether or not you can use a SATA drive, odds are it is IDE since SATA is more commong amongst computer at most 2 years old unless they are custom built ones. The original HDD should be set to master, so it should be simple to set the new one to slave, then your computer should automatically recognize the new drive and you can format it and set the file system to NTFS no sweat.

If I could do that, I wouldn't be on here asking this question. My motherboard is a custom built one by Dell specifically for my computer model. I only have one SATA port.

By the way, I did some more research and it appears that I am set so I just bought those two items that I mentioned in the first post. Thanks anyways for all the answers, I just needed some advice before performing an operation such as this.