Copy Everything From Your Old Drive to Your New One

10.02.2009
Buying a new hard drive with lots of storage space can give your PC a new lease on life and can improve your system's performance. But you need to make some decisions before you start transferring your data. I'll show you some smart tricks for moving your apps and files from their old home to their new one, so you can get back to work fast.

I'll assume that you've installed your new drive in your machine as a secondary hard drive (if not, see ""), and that you've successfully booted up onto your normal (old) Windows partition. The operating system has recognized the new, empty drive, and you've formatted the drive in Windows. Now how do you get your data from point A to point B?

You might think your final destination is but a drag-and-drop away-and it is, from a certain point of view. But if you want your new hard drive to be the primary storage device for your system, you need a suitable tool to handle the transfer. Moving the entire contents of your current drive to the new one isn't a task for Windows Explorer, by any means.

If you're satisfied with the storage you already have and want to use your new hard drive as extra space for your PC, just drag and drop the files you want to store on your new drive. But if the files you're moving reside in their default Windows location (such as the Documents, Music, or Videos folder), your system will default to its original folders in all of the applications you run-unless you alter some XP or Vista settings to instruct the operating system otherwise.

Set Up the New Drive as the Primary

You can't just drag and drop the contents of your primary hard drive to a new hard drive. For starters, Windows doesn't run in a void. The operating system itself is composed of a bunch of files on your hard drive. Also, depending on whether you've set up your machine to show Windows' hidden or critical operating system files, you may not be able to select and drag all of the files on the old drive anyway. In short, you will need some help.