Windows when changing harddrive

Hi

I want to install a new harddrive on my new Sony Vaio Z. The computer came with a cd saying that using that CD will downgrade me to windows XP. It also says that I can use Vaio recovery center to make recovery cd's to still have vista.

I want to change my harddrive, but don't want to downgrade to XP - are there anyone who can help me to what to do? I see three options:

- Create the cd's in vaio center - will that cut the deal?
- A small trick: download windows 7 and burn it on another computer - then put in the new harddrive and use windows 7 cd?
- Find a crack or buy vista again - this sucks!

Anyone?

 

ghost your old hard drive to your new hard drive

 

what he said. use a ghosting/imaging program to copy your entire HDD to an external drive, and then copy the image to the new internal HDD after the exchange.

 

Okay, so I have to:

- Find a ghosting program (anyone has a link?)
- Copy to an external harddrive
- Install my new harddrive etc
- Copy it back

Is it that straightforward - can I boot the new harddrive without an operating system?

thanks!

 

look at the Acronis thread from today, you might get lucky

Clone, "ghost" ...

Have fun tinkering

????? is it better just to clone the current drive to the new drive before installing it?

No OS, no go

cheers ...

 

you can just make recovery disks and reinstall vista using that
if you dont wanna go through ghosting.

 

If I install Office 2007, can I just ghost that with it then?

@ gary: can I make recovery disks without problems just using the installed software?

 

If I get a new harddisk, it won't have an operating system. So should I do the following:

- ghost my harddrive
- plug in the new harddrive

Then I need to get the ghosted stuff to my new harddrive. What do I do here? Do I have to boot it with recovery cd's and then download the ghosting program and the copying it over? Or what?

 

The disk imaging program can create a bootable CD that has the disk imaging and recovery software on it. You boot from that CD in order to restore the disk image that you created before.

And, of course, a disk imaging program does exactly what the name says: It will create an exact copy of your complete hard drive, including every single piece of software and data on it. This means after restoring, when you boot the system from the new hard drive, you computer will look and act exactly the same as it did when you had the old hard drive.

 

And to take that explanation one step further, the new hard drive will have one partition on it that is the exact same size as it was on your old hard drive and an unpartitioned area beyond it. Vista will allow you to then increase the size of the main partition into this unpartitioned space.

This also brings up another point. Some of the imaging apps allow you to image an entire drive or a particular partition. I have always imaged partitions, especially when upgrading to a larger drive. Other folks might want to chime in here on experiences with imaging the entire DRIVE and then restoring to a larger drive. It may work just as well, I just don't have first hand experience with that way.

Gary

 

If you get a Seagate HDD, you can download Seagate DiscWizard, attached the new HDD in a USB enclosure, cloned your existing HDD, swap them out. That's it. I've done it twice no problems.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/discwizard

Once you're up and running for a few days format your old HDD and use it for back up, again using SDW.

I recently got a 7200 rpm 320 GB Seagate HDD from NewEgg for $89. Here's a link and a $10 off coupon.

Added: Normally SDW will proportionally cloned your drive For instance going from 60 to 120 with a 20 GB partition and a 40 GB partition it would make it 40 and 80. You can also resize the partitions the way you want. I've done it both ways.

Only one of the HDD's needs to be a Seagate.

 

I wanted to switch to a solid statet drive, don't think any of these come with this software??? But it does indeed sound like a clever solution, one should almost sell the software separately!

 

It is sold separately, as Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0. Seagate uses a version of the Acronis product.