Replacing Hard Drive

Right now I have two hard drives. One has my system and the other is a storage drive for digital pictures. Now I bought a new larger drive to replace my system drive. I plan to remove the storage drive,insert the new drive,use the the Western Digital cd to transfer everything to the new drive. Then relace the old system drive with the new drive and reinstall the storage drive. What concerns me is switching the new drive from a slave drive to boot drive after downloading everything to it. Also if I was to loose the pictures on the storage drive I would be in a lot of trouble. I would appreciate any help.

 

Cloning should copy everything from the old HD to the new HD. Make sure your set both HDs to CABLE SELECT. Upon completion of the data transfer, shut down the PC, remove the old drive and replace it with the new HD. Put back the storage drive. Reboot PC. Data in the storage drive should NOT be affected as long as you set the jumper on both drives to cable select.

 

I will burn a CD of the storage drive before I do anything. There is 2.9 GB of pictures on it. What I am concerned about is when I put in the storage drive I went into Computer Management,Disk Management and set that drive as logical drive. So I have C drive as Primary Partition and F drive as Logical Drive. Now I will be removing F drive and installing the new drive in its place. Do I set it up as Logical Drive to download everything to it from C drive? Then after removing C and putting the new drive in its place do I have to do anything as far as disk management? I have XP Home SP2

 

It's best to use one primary active boot partition. You can add up to four primary partitions if you plan to multi-boot. All other partition(s) should be configured as extended logical.

The new drive should be blank. The cloning software will automatically format and copy data from the old drive to the new drive. Just follow the cloning instruction. There is no need to do ANYTHING in disk management. Improper alteration made in disc management can wipe the data in the HD.