presuming you have windoz(do not know about maks).

to move to a larger HDD, you must copy the entire drive, including the registry. to do this you need one of the special software packages like acronis or ghost. sounds like other packages recommended also work. you need an external box to put the drive in to fire it up and make the copy.

otherwise, you must reload windows, most all software packages, get online and run all updates, then move data from old to new HDD. this does clean a lot of garbage, but may be hard to accomplish in a day, as unless you get the external box, you will be swapping drives back and forth. also, if you just use an external box, and load the software, you may have to make the external the C drive, as some packages still do not like to switch from D to C.

80,100 and 120 gig drives are readily available.

Ah yes, the dreaed system restore. The one where you will do either of the two if you get a virus.

Remove the virus. Restore back to a clean version, antivirus is old and not updated worse virus attacks than before.

Or, remove virus, keep going and for some reason need to do a system restore, reactivating virus.

I always left my system restore OFF. It is evil!

/E

I used Acronis (which you can download on a 15 day trial) to upgrade a drive. Worked well other than taking forever as the notebook only has USB 1 ports.

Any down sides to Ghost?

I have a 40 gig HD on my ThinkPad that is almost full I but do not want to reinstall everything since all is exactly how I want it.

For example, my ThinkPad has a hidden partition with the orginal files that came with the system. Would this too be copied to the bigger HD?

Is it all done by USB?

Also, if I do this, can the ThinkPad HD be put into a enclosure?

I find Acronis to be less expensive, faster and easier to use. 2-3 years ago I started trying to use ghost. I found that ghost had some glitches when I tried to use it to make a backup to a network attached storage. Switched to Acronis and never looked back.

for a free software alternative, try G4U
 

google for it to find the download site. It's a command line disk duplication utility that is free, and comes as an ISO image that creates a self booting CD-Rom. I used it to duplicate my thinkpad T41's disk when I upgraded from a 40GB to a 100GB drive.

I prefer G4U to both Acronis and Ghost, for straight disk cloning.

Also, when hooking up the new drive in an external enclosure for the cloning, make sure you're using a USB 2.0 connection. If, for instance, you have it attached thru a USB 1.0 hub, the copy will take a VERY VERY VERY long time (I may have done this by accident my first time).

Bob

Copying the drive's been covered... but wrt the other question, no, you can't necessarily get any 2.5" drive, you have to get one with the same interface (ata vs. sati). Your laptop may also have limitations on power & heat. Thus, it is possible that you may not be able to get a faster drive (7200rpm). There are also large differences in reliability between different 2.5" laptop drives. Some have shock sensors, some don't, for example. Depending on how you use your laptop, that could be really important.

Lastly, if you have access to a desktop, you can purchase for < $10, an adapter which would allow you to connect a laptop drive to the desktop's ide connector (sata would be different). That is an alternative to the external usb, and in the end would get you some additional space on your desktop. With this approach, you could hook up both drives to the desktop use one of many tools to move stuff from one to the other.

To the OP: Is the original drive PATA or SATA? They are absolutely NOT interchangeable.

Yes, you want to copy the hidden partition over as well. Keep that partition the same size as the original. The recovery software and files may be in the hidden partition.

Ghost didn't work for me, I think because my Dell i600m had an extra recovery partition. Not sure why ghost didn't work, but I just gave up after several attempts. I ended up using something called CasperXP which worked fine. You end up having to pay for it if you want to resize partitions, which is probably what you want to do to make your c partition use the extra space on the new drive. But you can try the free/trial version first to make sure it works before paying for the paid version. Seagate's software didn't work for me either. I don't remember why.

And yes, at the end of the process, my old drive is in the enclosure, the new drive is in the laptop. The old drive serves as a backup for a while until you're sure the new drive functions ok, then you can wipe it and do other stuff with it. Or you can just keep it as an original backup from the date you did the swap. The enclosure is also useful in case you have problems with an internal drive. You can remove the drive, stick it in the enclosure and then try to diagnose problems with the drive on another computer with a USB slot.

I went from a 40G 4200 RPM drive to an 80G 7200 RPM drive (Seagate IDE) and you could see the better performance immediately. Specifically, booting is a lot faster. Application startup is a lot faster, etc.

Before you start, you might want to check how your old drive is physically attached. I've seen some notebooks that have cheap special brackets that make it difficult, if not impossible to swap them. My i600m had a very nice removable tray. The drive just slides into and out of it, with one screw for the tray on the bottom of the notebook.

So, if you already have ghost, try it, but if you don't have it already, I would skip it and try Casper XP (or something else that's been recommended) instead. It's all available by download.

Finally, if your recovery partition is bootable (isn't there some sort of blue button on thinkpads to boot the recovery partition?) you probably want to test that after you copy everything over to make sure it works. Mine doesn't work properly, but it didn't work before either, but I still kept it.

I'm still using ghost for monthly full backups and weekly incremental backups, but it just didn't work for copying my drive. I have Ghost 9.0. Maybe the newer version works better.

-David

BTW, here's the enclosure I used. Yes it's USB and IDE and it comes with both cables. I needed to use both cables for reliable operation (to make sure it got enough power) with the Seagate 7200RPM drive. It's powered by the USB ports on the machine you plug it into. USB power is limited, so the extra power cable plugs in to a 2nd USB port on the host computer for more power only. With XP, you don't need to install any drivers, so ignore the disks it comes with.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817145658

-David