Hard Drive Replacement

I have reason to believe the hard drive on this desktop is on its way out, so I am going to replace it with a Seagate 1Tb HD. The existing one is a 500 Gb.HD

I am quite happy with the physical job of installing the new drive but I am looking for a reliable process for configuring the new drive and migrating all the information ( including Windows) from the old to the new. There seems to be a number of options out there including cloning, so I am looking for some guidance on the best solutions to use. I understand Windows can format the new drive if required, but should I use a complete package that does this to reduce any errors? Obviously the partitions on the new disk will be larger, so whatever package I use I will have to be able to configure the new drive with them.

I have looked on this site at the tutorials and haven't found anything that actually deals with this - maybe I am looking in the wrong place.

Thanks in advance.

parsonm said:

I have reason to believe the hard drive on this desktop is on its way out, so I am going to replace it ... I am looking for a reliable process for configuring the new drive and migrating all the information ( including Windows) from the old to the new. There seems to be a number of options out there including cloning, so I am looking for some guidance on the best solutions to use.

I used Macrium Reflect to make an image of the dying HDD, then restored it to a replacement SSD.

Bree said:

I have a Dell Latitude E7440 that needed an emergency drive transplant when its original HDD started developing a large number of reallocated sectors.

Before it deteriorated further I successfully made a Macrium image of the HDD to an external HDD (nearly doubling the dying drive's reallocated sectors in the process). I bought a new SSD of the same capacity as the dying HDD and restored the Macrium image to that. I actually did the restore on another machine with the SSD in a usb external drive enclosure, but you could equally well install the SSD in the laptop, boot from a Macrium recovery usb and use that to do a restore 'in place'.

Replacing a laptop hard drive with a SSD

Thanks to everyone for responding. I haven't be back for awhile as the hard drive totally failed before I had a chance to clone it. Apparently the failure does not permit software retreival, so I am faced with a large bill to recover data from a specialist. Let this be a lesson to those that don't have full backups!