Hard Drive Upgrade and Cloning

Time had come to retire my secondhand hdd. It was filling up quickly, with precious little room to spare. I chose a cheap Seagate 7200.10 w/ 250G of space to replace the little fella. I also wanted to clone my old disk to the new one. The whole pc is aging, but I want to get a little more use out of it before I try my hand at another build.....

I had never replaced a hard drive with a cloned new one before, so I began the adventure.

First, my new $55 (w/ free shipping from NewEgg) hd was OEM - just the drive. That was okay, I knew I had a SATA cable somewhere, and a baggie of screws. I had heard about Norton Ghost and some other cloning utilities. Well, as you may already have noticed, I am rather a cheapskate (thank my german heritage). I was not about to pay more than a couple of dollars for software, and didn't want to wait. But - AHA! Seagate has a utility on its website called DiskWizard, a free hdd utility that also does cloning, based on Acronis, a respected software program.

Here goes.

1. Downloaded DiskWizard to old hard drive.

2. Installed SATA hard drive. Stupid screw holes did not line up, and a little bending was in order. Found the power connector for the SATA drive, and connected it, and connected the SATA cable to the disk and the m/b. Too bad m/b only supports SATA 1. (mk8-939 Mach Speed Viper)

3. Case closed, boot up. Hmm- where is my new drive??

4. I found that I had to go to rt click on My Computer >Manage >Disk Management. There it is!
Right click on the box for the new hd and initialize.

5. Another right click, this time in the box showing the new drive space, and select new partition, primary, and use others as default (tho I did change volume name to something more descriptive). Aaand.. it worked! I made the drive active here.

6. A quick check shows my new drive, (as 'E') and I can write and read to it!

Rebooted here just for the heck of it.

7. Clonage begins! Running DiskWizard. At this point I see I could probably have used DiscWizard to install the new hd. Either way, we are good here. I continue on to cloning tool, and follow the steps.

8. Another reboot :) DiskWizard does its magic. Be patient.

9. Success! And the screen requests to press any button to close down.

10. On my next reboot I del into the bios, and make the new, bigger, better hard drive the one I want to boot from (after the CD drive), and bravely go on...

11. Woohoo! Magic happened! I am now working on the new Seagate drive, and the change so far, seems to be ah... seamless.... It is now the C drive, and my old drive has become the E drive.
This was much easier than I had anticpated. I love when that happens :)

12. It remains to be seen how I would use the other drive. I guess I will save it as backup for a while... Will windows question my upgrade? Would I be able to just put the old hd in another pc and access my programs as well as my files? These questions will be answered in time I suppose. For now, my time has to be spent elsewhere.