Question about hard drive data transferring

My 40 Gb hard drive in my laptop is being filled up pretty quickly because of the many video projects that I have. I'm already being forced to remove some of my games. 40 Gb just doesn't cut it.

I'm planning to buy a 160 Gb hard drive and I was wondering if it's possible for me to transfer all my data from my 40 Gb hard drive to the new one. As in, creating an exact replica which includes the OS, apps and everything on my old hard drive. I was thinking of plugging the two hard drives through SATA cables and transferring all the data. Is this possible? I'm using the same computer anyway, just different hard drive. I just want to know if this will work.

Thanks!

 

You can easily do this with a utility like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image...it is called 'cloning' the hard drive. I prefer Acronis, mainly because it is a little easier to use and Ghost does not recognize SATA drives unless you use them over a USB interface or disable SATA mode.

 

Thanks for the help Greg.

Umm, so you can actually clone a hard drive using that software? Here's the situation (please bear with me):

When I get my new hard drive, I was planning on having the store clone my old hard drive into the new one by plugging both hard drives into a PC and do the transfer there. At home, PC's been last for the past week and I'm still planning to get a new one, so I don't have absolute transfer options right now by plugging two hard drives into one system.

What I'm thinking of now is enclosing one of the hard drives first to turn it into a portable HDD and copy pasting the data. But from what I know, you can't clone a hard drive using this method. Please correct me if I'm wrong. After all, I'll just turn the old 40 Gb hard drive into a portable HDD by enclosing it.

 

Yep, I'm doing one now. I recently ordered a 250GB WD HDD for my laptop along with an external USB 2.0 case. Everything came in this morning, I put the 250GB in the external enclosure. Plug it in, initialize the drive in drive management (you may not need to but I did it out of habits). Fire up True Image 10 and have it clone my existing HDD over. Once done, All you need is to swap the new drive into the laptop and it should boot up with everything from the old.

 

Thanks a lot! But, just a quickie. So everything looks exactly the same? As if you still have the same hard drive but with more capacity? Sorry for the extra question. >_<

 

If you use Acronis to "clone" your old hard drive onto a new drive it will look exactly like your old drive, but with more free space than before.

The only cloning software I've used is Acronis, so I can't give you a comparison with other applications, but from my experience I would say that Acronis was very easy to use. In my case, I had to replace a failing drive that was slowly eating itself up; Acronis was able to clone the old drive onto the new drive without getting thrown off course by the bad sectors on the old drive. As an added bonus, the software can be used to backup your drive as well.

 

Thanks for the help guys. I got everything I need to know now.