PC Hacks

Hack #95. Clone Your Hard Disk

Getting a shiny new PC is a wonderful experience, but a new computer won't have the lived-in feel of your familiar old PC. If your old PC is just the way you want it but not fast enough, won't accept as much RAM as you need, can't take a better video adapter, or doesn't have a big enough hard drive space, then cloning it onto a new hard drive is easy.

Most of your PC's "personality" is on the hard drive—all of the desktop settings, browser preferences and history, and, of course, datafiles. You can transfer and retain that personality on a new PC or simply on a new hard drive with disk imaging software like Symantec's GHOST or Drive Image (http://www.symantec.com) or Acronis's True Image, (http://www.acronis.com).

Warning

Have your device driver installation disks handy if you are cloning to a new PC that's different from your previous one. The biggest trouble comes when the new PC has a totally different motherboard. (Windows will usually forgive other hardware changes.) If you're staying with the same chipset manufacturer (Intel, Via, etc.) but only leaping a chipset generation or two, it should go smoothly. A big jump, such as from a Pentium II system to an AMD64 system, is probably not going to work. Even a seemingly small jump, such as from a Pentium 3 to a Pentium 4, could be troublesome. Your mileage may vary.

Note

This process is acceptable but not "perfect" when used with Windows XP and marginally acceptable with Windows 2000. This technique ...