swapping hard drive

Hi, I just got a new faster hard drive for my notebook and would like to know the best way to install the new drive without having to buy any additional software. I also have an external enclosure to aid the process. I tried to look for past info on here but didn't find anything. Thank you...


Notebook is a fujitsu s6210

 

i'm a little unclear on your question.

if all you want to do is install the new drive, you don't need any software to do so, simply remove the old drive from the caddy and replace with the new one.

do you mean you want to copy the image over to the new hard drive once you physically install it?

 

Just pop the Windows CD and reinstall it. That won't cost anything.

 

You could always ghost the hard drive, as posted by miner. Then you wouldn't have to reinstall anything.

Other than that, if you still have the program installers, just reinstall Windows, as well as the sofware.

 

sorry for the confusion! The laptop didn't come with any windows cd. Is there away I can use the current hard drive to install windows on the new hdd? I have windows xp pro cd from another laptop, but this one came with xp home installed. Can I use xp pro cd and product key from xp home? Ghosting requires purchasing additional software?

 

In that case, I would get some ghosting software and ghost the current drive over...that seems to be the only viable solution.

 

if you desire, you can install using the pro CD, since you already have/purchased it, there's nothing wrong with installing it on your new machine.

 

Can I install it on more than 1 machine?

 

You should be able to clone your hard drive for free. A guy on newegg.com said he did this:

Installation could not have been easier. I installed the Hitachi in a USB enclosure and cloned my original drive using Acronis True Image 9.0 (free trial version available at their web site). Then I just installed the drive into my notebook. The cloning took about 3 hours; the installation took five minutes.

Hope this helps!

Matt

 

Thank you, some how that's exactly what I did before I read your reply! I was looking into maybe purchasing it but then found the trial version. I cloned 2 hdd and it didn't even take 3 hrs for both. I think it took about 30-45 minutes for each. I did a disk clean up of the source hdd, then cloned, then defrag the newly cloned drive before I swapped it.