Windows 7 Nee assistance with hard drive imaging/cloning.

[ebuddy1113]

Hello my name is Ethan,

It is nearing the holidays and computer hardware updates are inevitable. My hard drive currently is a 500 gigabyte Seagate model and it is almost full. I am soon to receive and new 2 terabyte Seagate model. I am going to use a raid system on my motherboard to combine the hard drives. I have done some research and I have found out that using raid will wipe your hard drive. This is something that does not appeal to me and I would like to copy all my hard drive onto an external 1 terabyte drive. If anyone could just leave a reply on a walk through on how to do this in my specific case I would really appreciated it.

 

[seekermeister]

Why not simply copy/paste the content from one drive to another? Depending on the partitioning and content of the source drive, it might be easier to clone it. I don't use it much, but Macrium Reflect is a good imaging and cloning program (free). Here is an article pertaining to your question:

http://kb.macrium.com/KnowledgebaseArticle50081.aspx

 

[Joe S]

I believe for RAID to work properly you need drives of the same size. If you look on Seagate site they may have free imaging software. I also think there may be problems with imaging and cloning with Raid setups.
Joe

 

[seekermeister]

I got the impression that he is going to transfer the data off the current drive, that isn't RAID, to an external drive that isn't RAID either. If true, then RAID isn't an issue. I'm not a RAID expert, but I think that when using drives of different size, that it would set the RAID to the smaller drive size, but the RAID would work okay. The unused portion of the drive may not be accessible, but I'm not certain about that. If the RAID is set to mirror, rather than striping, I think that imaging and cloning would also work, because both drives have exactly the same data on them, where with striping it is scattered in a fragmentary fashion across both drives.

If I recall, the version provided by Seagate is the lite version, which doesn't have many of the features of the retail version. This shows a comparison:

http://kb.acronis.com/content/43726

But I didn't see whether it includes cloning or not.

 

[ebuddy1113]

Now that I think of it I could probably just take out the old hard drive and just put in the new one. RAID does not really seem like a good idea anymore. Either way Windows 7 is going to somehow be copied out of my hard drive and on to another an external one. When I start my computer it won't have windows on it it will just start in the BIOS. So how do I put my windows files onto the new hard drive without installing new ones (since I am in the BIOS)?

 

[seekermeister]

Make a backup image, instead of just copying the files.