If you've just bought a new hard disk, there's a fairly good chance that you'll
want it to be your primary disk from which you boot. Whether that's because your old disk is too slow or because it's failing, copying everything to your new disk isn't as easy as it sounds. Fortunately, we're here to help with our complete guide on how to transfer everything from an old disk to a new one. David Ludlow Editor copying an old hard disk to a new one You don't need to reinstall Windows if you've installed a new hard disk. david Ludlow shows you how to clone your old disk On the face of it, copying an old hard disk to a new one should simply be a matter of dragging files from one to the other. However, it's not that simple. You'll face two problems doing it this way: Windows will lock some files and won't let you copy them, and boot information won't be carried across. To do it properly, you need disk-cloning software. This runs on a bootable CD and lets you copy every aspect of one hard disk, including applications, files, the operating system and boot information, to another disk. In this month's Advanced Projects we'll show you how to do this with CloneZilla, which is completely free. CloneZilla allows you to copy one disk to another or one partition to another disk. It can even expand a smaller disk to fill a larger one, so that you don't have to create new partitions manually. No matter how you want to deal with your new disk, though, we'll take you through the process step by step. First, download CloneZilla from www.clonezilla.org/download/sourceforge. Click the Stable (Debian-based) iso/zip and download the latest version of the .iso file to your hard disk. You then need to write the .iso file to a blank CD. You can use any disc-burning software for this. Windows 7 has native support for .iso files; simply right-click on the file, select Open with, Windows Disc Image Burner and click the Burn button. If you're using an older operating system you can use the free CDBurnerXP ( http://cdburnerxp.se) application to burn your disc. 1 Boot from the CloneZilla CD you created earlier and you'll get to choose the resolution in which you want to run the software. Unless you're using a particularly small screen or you're having other problems, the first menu option (1,024x768) is the best. When the main application starts, select English as your language. The next screen will ask you to configure your keyboard, but it's best to leave the default settings, so select Don't touch keymap. Select Start CloneZilla on the next screen. In the next menu, select how you want to use the software. As we want to copy one hard disk to another, choose device-device; the device-image option makes a backup image of a hard disk. Select Expert on the next screen. 3 To make a complete copy of a hard disk, select disk_to_local_disk; the other options let you copy a hard disk to a hard disk on another computer, or just copy one partition. On the next screen you'll need to select your source hard disk. As we haven't changed anything yet, this will be the first hard disk in your computer, listed as sda or hda. Check the displayed model number and listed size of the disk to make sure you've chosen the right one. It's very important to do this, or you could lose all your data. The next screen shows the available source hard disks; if you have only two disks in your computer, your new hard disk will be the only one shown. Make sure you make the right selection if you have multiple hard disks and press Enter. Press Enter again. 4 You'll now see a list of the Expert options you can select. If you'd like to use just your new hard disk, select 'Resize the filesystem to fit partition size of target partition'. This will expand your old disk to fit your new one. If you leave this option blank, your old hard disk will be copied to a partition of the same size on your new hard disk; to use any extra space, you'll have to create a new partition in Windows. Select 'Use the partition table from the source disk' on the next menu to start the copy procedure. Press Enter to continue. 5 CloneZilla will now check your hard disks and ask if you want to continue. Type Y and press Enter. Type Y and press Enter, again to confirm the second warning. Finally, type Y and press Enter to confirm that you want to copy the boot sector of your hard disk (if you don't, you'll be unable to boot from your new hard disk). Finally, type Y and press Enter again to confirm that you want to clone your hard disk. 6 CloneZilla will now copy your old hard disk to your new one, which can take anything from around 20 minutes to a couple of hours. When it's finished, press Enter to continue. Press 1 to reboot your computer, remove the CD when it's ejected and press Enter to confirm. choosing the Boot PRioRitY To boot from your new hard disk you need to make sure it's the first boot disk. There are two ways of doing this. First, you can switch data cables between your old hard disk and new hard disk. As SATA ports are numbered, this will put your new hard disk further up the chain than your old one. An easier method is to use the BIOS to set the hard disk boot priority. All BIOSes are slightly different, but the basic options are similar. Look in the Advanced BIOS Features menu for an option called Hard Disk Boot Priority. In this menu, select your new hard disk as the first model to boot from. You'll be able to identify hard disks by their model name. If you don't have a Hard Disk Boot Priority menu, your disks should be listed in the standard boot priority options in the Advanced BIOS Features menu. Select the Second Boot Device option and press Enter. From the list of options, select your new hard disk. Save your settings and exit the BIOS. Your computer should now start automatically from your new hard disk. conFigURing WinDoWs If you click on Computer in the Start menu you'll find that only one hard disk is listed. This is because when you cloned your existing hard disk it copied the disk signature, which Windows uses to identify separate disks. To fix the problem you need to configure your hard disks correctly. Right-click on Computer in the Start menu and select Manage, then click on Disk Management. Your old hard disk will have an Offline message next to it, telling you there's a problem. To fix it, right-click your old disk (probably listed as Disk 1) and select Online. Your old hard disk will now appear in Computer, and you can browse through it. You can either keep this disk as it is until you're happy that your new disk is working correctly or you can wipe it and start again. We'd recommend keeping your old hard disk intact until you've read through the New Partitions section below. That way, in the unlikely event of anything going wrong, you'll still have a hard disk with a working version of your operating system on it. Remember, if something does go wrong and you want to boot from your hard disk, you'll need to set your BIOS so that your old hard disk has boot priority. To erase the disk, right-click your old disk in Computer and select Format. Make sure that Quick Format is selected and click Start. Click OK on the warning message that appears. A Quick Format should take just a few seconds. Click OK when prompted and your old disk will be blank and ready for use. managing neW PaRtitions If you decided not to tell CloneZilla to resize the file system to fill your new hard disk, you may find that you're not using all the space on your new hard disk. If you'd like to use all the available capacity, you need Disk Management. Your new hard disk will be listed as Disk 0. Inside this disk you'll see all the partitions available for use. If you're using Windows 7, it's normal to have a partition at the start of the disk that's 100MB in size and called System Reserved. This should be left alone. The following partition will be called C: and is where your operating system is stored. If you still have any unallocated space, it means you're not using your full disk. If you'd like to create a second partition, right-click the Unallocated space and select New Simple Volume. Click Next, type in the amount of disk space you want to use (the default is all the spare space on your hard disk). Click Next to assign a drive letter. Leave the Format options at their default settings and click Next and then Finish to complete creating your new partition. Alternatively, if you'd rather encompass all your disk's spare space into the C: drive, right-click the C: partition and select Extend volume. Click Next and you get to choose how much free disk space you want to add to the existing partition. The default option is the entire free space, so click Next. Click Finish to complete the operation and your C: partition will now be larger. This partition doesn't have to be reformatted and your files will remain intact. Technical telepathy: 09969636745 Saints are not always saints; sinners are not always sinners. Voice your thoughts in the blog to discuss the Rights of persons with disability bill at: http://www.accessindia.org.in/harish/blog.htm To unsubscribe send a message to accessindia-requ...@accessindia.org.in with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
