SZ44 - Hard Drive upgrade + Vista

Hello,
I want to upgrade my hard drive from the 100gb to a 250Gb and im wondering about vista, ideally I want to take an image of my current vista install and use a program like Acronis true image to copy it to my external drive and then after I install the new drive, use the program to copy the image onto the new hard drive without having to reinstall everything.


Has anyone ever done this and do you think its possible/safe?

The other option would be just to do a clean install on the new hard drive using my recovery discs (would they work on a new HDD that has no recovery partition?)

Thanks
Sean

 

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

 

Yes, it will work. I did the exact same thing, used Acronis True Image to create a backup on an external usb disk, installed new disk and restored the partition.

Acornis is slow when copying to external usb disks, could be the drivers. I had more than one partition on my old disk. So I created a back on another parition on the same disk then copied the backup from within Vista to the external disk.

On the new disk I first recreated the partitons using Acronis Disk Director and then restored to backup to the Primary partition.

True Image should be able to restore a parition of say 100GB to a new disk of 250GB and extend, or you could create your parition first and True Image will use all of it to restore to. Or you could copy your 100GB back and then use Disk Director or similar to extend it. I think Vista can also now extend partition size without destroying your data.

It can work in a number of ways but it will work.

If you want a clean install of Vista follow the guide in my sig.