Replacing Hardrive

Yo'

I'm looking at getting the new Seagate Momentus XT since I'm only on a Samsung 5400 (stock) and I want to replace it since you can't have a bracket for two hardrives in my laptop *tear. Instead of doing a fresh install of windows and installing all of the drivers manually (since I don't know which ones I need etc.) I want to transfer the windows files onto the new hardrive, my friend said it could be done so I'm sort of relying on his comment for this. Any opinions or comments?

 

It's certainly possible (via cloning), but just remember that cloning that way will also bring over all the "garbage" you have on your old drive, which may keep your new drive from being as fast as it should. Windows 7 is supposed to be able to do a pretty good job of finding the necessary drivers on its own, and if not, it's usually easy enough to go to HP's website for your Dv6 and get the necessary drivers from there.

 

I don't know what kind of connectivity options you have going for you, but you could look into cloning the drive. Were both installed at the same time (on your machine, or someone else's) you could use one of the features of the Ulitimate Boot CD to clone one to the other.

Along the same lines, you could make a system image using Windows Backup and restore that image to the XT.

Regardless, for cloning of any sort to happen, you kinda gotta have both drives hooked up at the same time.

 

And if i were to go for the fresh method, I just install the hardrive into the bay and have the Windows 7 CD in the optical drive and install right - never done a fresh install). After that is it simply a matter of going online and installing all the necessary drivers?

At this stage it looks like i might clone the drive as I don't have a Windows 7 CD as it came pre-installed, but If i can find a disk then certainly I'll go with the fresh method as the amount of HP bloatware on this machine is quite phenomenal.

 

For fresh install, install your new hard drive, boot, insert the disc, set the ODD as the primary boot, and when the install screen comes up, select the new HDD you want to install to. You can pick what size you want your boot partition to be. After that it's looking for drivers, but Win7 auto updates are pretty good with finding your critical drivers. To speed things up, download the drivers you want/need and put them on a flash drive for easy access.

As for a Win7 disc, look around this thread, and download and burn the correct Win7 version. Then just use your Win7 sticker/key and boom, fresh install.

That's basically what I did, actually. Used the downloaded Win7 media and then the drivers disc that came with my laptop. Got to pick what I want and ignore what I didn't.