Need to migrate to a new hard drive on Windows 7

[ictponder]

Just got my hard drive back from warranty repair and need to move everything back to it ie: OS, all installed programs

What would be the best program to use to do this? Also, will I have to reactivate Windows if I manage to migrate to the new hard drive?

[CoopKill]

Are you migrating from an existing drive to another? Or have to start from fresh?

If you are migrating from a drive that is set up already to a different drive, Win7 can create a disk image and you can go that route. You would need to have a few DVD's or a network/external drive to accomplish this though.

You will not have to reactivate if the rest of your hardware is unchanged.

[nodoze]

if moving from an old hd you have in hand to a new one already installed i bought a couple hd enclosures one for ide and one for sata that basicly turns it into a usb flash drive. you may or may not have to go through and change ownership over to your new os and that can take some time

[ictponder]

I'm going from one physical disc to another. Both are installed and recognized in windows.

I'm going to try Acronis True Image and see if I get anywhere with that. If it works I need to figure out how to keep all my movies and mp3 albums on the extra (current system drive) hard drive but still have Windows 7 see them as they are now in the proper libraries.

[SupraMKIII]

You can change the location of the library directories after you get the files moved.

If you click start, then right click pictures, music, etc, and click properties, you can change what folders are monitored and included in the libraries.

[GTOJOE]

Use Acronis [boot off the disc]. Go to the tools section and there is a clone disc option. Clone your current disc to the new [repair drive]. Very simple. I use this program almost daily.

[YoshiBishi]

^ That is the way to go.

[ictponder]

Use Acronis [boot off the disc]. Go to the tools section and there is a clone disc option. Clone your current disc to the new [repair drive]. Very simple. I use this program almost daily.

That's what I ended up doing and it worked perfectly. Apparently some people have issues with doing the clone while the OS is active and end up with a login loop with the new hard drive. Overall this utility was very nice and easy to use.

I set windows on it's own 80gb partition and the other 670gb I will use for programs. My old hard drive will be for mp3's and movies. Acronis has a feature for a recovery boot option so I might make a restore partition which will work identical to the Dell Restore Utility.

[YoshiBishi]

Glad things worked out ! If you end up with the boot loop, most of the time booting your machine to the Windows 7 disk and running a startup repair will fix it.

[sketch]

i'm late to the party but any disk-disk imaging utility FTMFW IMO

Glad things worked out ! If you end up with the boot loop, most of the time booting your machine to the Windows 7 disk and running a startup repair will fix it.

so true. windows 7 startup repair is actually very robust. it's even told me about dead/dying hard drives on student laptops before i've gotten the chance to run any hardware diagnostics on it.

glad it worked out for you =]