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mchiles

25 Posts

3444

October 27th, 2004 20:00

Upgrading Laptop Hard Drive - How Do I Clone??

Hello,
 
I have an Inspiron 8500 with an 40GB Hard Drive running Windows XP Pro with SP2.  Dell has dropped the price of their larger OEM laptop replacement hard drives and I would like to upgrade to the 60GB or 80GB model. 
 
I have done hard drive upgrades in Dell desktops before with success.  However, those were cases where I could have both the old source and new target hard drives both installed in the computer and used software like "Drive Image" to "clone' the source hard drive to the new hard drive. I don't want to reload all my original software and user files on my laptop, so I would like to 'clone' the existing hard drive of this laptop to the new hard drive and then pull the old hard drive from the laptop and then install the new larger hard drive.  Has anyone been able to "clone" and install a larger hard drive on their Dell Insprion laptop??
 
How does one 'Clone' a hard drive on a laptop when you can't install both hard drives in the laptop??  Or can you??   On desktops, there are IDE ribbon cables with two drive connectors and extra power connectors.   Are there such a thing for laptops???  Also, Drive Image has been taken over by Symantec.  I have Norton Ghost in my Systemworks 2004.  Has anybody had good experience with Norton Ghost cloning hard drives on laptops.  To 'clone' the laptop hard drive, will I have to make a Ghost disk image to CD or DVD and then restore it to the new hard drive??  I've heard 'horror' stories about using Ghost.  (sorry for the pun)   Has anyone used Casper XP for drive-2-drive cloning? 
 
Any information on this matter will be apprieciated.
 
Thanks,
 
Mark
 
 

Oditius

2 Intern

 • 

808 Posts

October 27th, 2004 20:00

I clone my 8600 every week useing CasperXP. When I went to the 60 gig from the 40 (the 60 was 7200rpm fast and silent) I bought a 2nd hard drive module to put where my DVD+RW goes. Used CasperXP to clone it to the 60, then pulled out the 40 and replaced it with the 60. I put the 40 in to the module so I can keep cloneing till I need more that the 40gig drive.

whymewhynot

2 Intern

 • 

174 Posts

October 27th, 2004 23:00

I used a Apricorn easy upgrade pack to do the deed, it comes with a 2 1/2 inch hdd enclosure ( reasonably neat) , power source  ez clone software. Works painlessly and flawlessly. Cost about $70 plus the new hdd  . Like has been already mentioned after changing hdd over it is a good way of keeping a clone of you hdd , update weekly or whatever, then if you have a crash you just swap drives ( ezupgrade makes the drive bootable , you don't even need to activate xp etc, ) and clone back to the bad one !!

 

whymewhynot

RichardLusignan

269 Posts

October 29th, 2004 18:00

I don't know how much data we're talking about, but what I did last time was to burn the image to a DVD (or a couple of CDs if you don't have a DVD+R) using Deploy Center 5 (Enterprise version of Drive Image) with a compression ratio of about 50%.
 
Of course, if you have a 20-30 Gig image, that won't help much, especially if you only have the CD-R drive.... In that case an external enclosure for your laptop's HD is indeed the best solution.
 
Another way would be to connect your laptop to another computer via a simple network share and drop the image to the other computer's hard drive and restore via ethernet from that location if your imaging software supports network transfer.
 
Best of luck,
 
Rick

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