I just bought a 320GB hard drive and I had a 80GB I was giving my old HD away but I wanted to copy the OS and everything to the 320 one. I want it to boot up as same as my old harddrive did I dont want to reinstall windows on the 320GB HD and copy the files over. Is there anyway to do this?

The way to do it is to clone your old hard drive on the new.

The way to do this depends on what software you have.

Do you currently have any partitioning software?

Who is the manufacturer of the new drive? Some offer cloning options.

Then there is GParted which will require your setting up a partition of equal size on your new drive. This is explained in post #8 of this thread:

http://www.d-a-l.com/help/showthread...hlight=gparted

My new hard drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148139
(Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (Perpendicular Recording) ST3320620A 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive - OEM)

I want just 1 primary partition on the 320 HD

I have a copy of Norton Ghost 12 but I have not installed it yet.

Ghost should be able to do it:

http://ghost.radified.com/ghost_4.htm

Also Seagate DiscWizard:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.js...00dd04090aRCRD

Or Maxtor MaxBlast:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.js...00dd04090aRCRD

Thank you jephree I'm thinking that the Seagate DiscWizard will be the best choice? Seeing I dont really know how to use Ghost and the Seagate DiscWizard looks a bit easier and only does one thing and that one thing is what I want to do.

Yes it should work fine:

http://www.seagate.com/support/discwizard/dw_ug.en.pdf

I've cloned with MaxBlast for Maxtor drives. Maxtor and Seagate have since merged.

I suggest running the new drive as Secondary Master during the clone. In other words temporarily remove the cable to your DVD/CD drive and hook it up to the target clone drive. You will be cloning from Primary Master to Secondary Master.

Cloning from Master to slave on the same cable is often problematic.

Originally Posted by jephree

Yes it should work fine:

http://www.seagate.com/support/discwizard/dw_ug.en.pdf

I've cloned with MaxBlast for Maxtor drives. Maxtor and Seagate have since merged.

I suggest running the new drive as Secondary Master during the clone. In other words temporarily remove the cable to your DVD/CD drive and hook it up to the target clone drive. You will be cloning from Primary Master to Secondary Master.

Cloning from Master to slave on the same cable is often problematic.

What type of problems occur? I want to use Master to slave because it will be less of a hassle.

I could never get it to work with MaxBlast. Although the clone would appear to run through trying to use the cloned drive always failed.

I called Maxtor support and they told me to only clone Master to Master. I did and all was well.

All you have to do is move the cable from your DVD/CD then move it back afterwards.

Originally Posted by jephree

I could never get it to work with MaxBlast. Although the clone would appear to run through trying to use the cloned drive always failed.

I called Maxtor support and they told me to only clone Master to Master. I did and all was well.

All you have to do is move the cable from your DVD/CD then move it back afterwards.

Ah understood thanks for the tip.