Photo by Jeff Kubina.
If you've bumped up against the limits of your small, old hard drive over and over, it may be time to upgrade. In some instances, all the desktop user may need to do is install a second (or third) hard drive for a little more space. But that's not always an option, especially for laptop users. The solution: Clone your old drive—complete with your operating system and all your data—to a new, bigger drive.
For the purpose of this article, we're going to start after the point at which you've physically installed the hard drive—there's just a couple of screws and a cable, after all, but if you still need some help you can check out our guide to installing a hard drive for a primer on the basic technique.
Below, we'll highlight a few tools that can help you clone your old hard drive to a new one (and choose a favorite we'll use), detail a few of the finer points for getting started on a laptop or desktop computer, then guide you through the cloning and upgrading process.
Options for Cloning Your Drive
To upgrade your hard drive without reinstalling everything, you'll need to use a utility to make an exact copy, or clone, from the old hard drive to the new one. A number of commercial tools will do this for you, and even some free Windows utilities can make a copy of your drive while your PC is running. For example, see our guide to using DriveImageXML to hot image your PC's hard drive, which is an excellent tool for making a backup. The problem, however, is that it doesn't create a true clone of the drive, since you'd still have to reinstall the Windows bootloader using a repair CD if you wanted to boot into your cloned drive.
The bigger problem, particularly if you're upgrading a laptop, is that you need to have a copy of Windows already running for most of the free utilities to work; most laptops can only have one drive hooked up at a time. In this case, your best free option is the Linux-based Clonezilla Live CD, which streamlines the process of imaging your drive to an external drive or even a shared folder on another PC.
Upgrading a Desktop Hard Drive
When it comes to upgrades, desktops are always going to be easier to deal with since you can easily get in there and move cables around, and in this case, because you can hook both drives up at the same time, greatly simplifying the whole process.
What you'll want to do is hook the new drive up—since we'll be using a boot CD, you can save a step by plugging the new hard drive into the primary slot, and move the old one to the secondary—so once the cloning is done you won't have to do anything else.
Upgrading a Laptop Hard Drive
Method One: While some laptops have the capability to swap out the optical drive and add another hard drive, it's not common, so you'll need to use an external USB hard drive, or potentially another PC with a shared folder, to save an image of the current drive. Once you've created the image, you can install the new drive, and then restore the image onto the new hard drive.
Method Two: Your other option is to install the new hard drive, use an external USB to SATA adapter to hook the old drive to the laptop, and then clone the drives that way. This eliminates the extra step of copying to a secondary device, but requires spending a little extra money for something you might not use very often—so you might want to borrow one from a geek friend that does PC repair (or just use the first method above).
How to Clone Your Drive with Clonezilla
Now we're ready to clone our old drive to our new one. The first thing you'll need to do is download a copy of the Clonezilla ISO image, and then use a software like ImgBurn to burn it to a CD. For best results, you should grab the Alternative Ubuntu-based version, which has better compatibility with modern hardware.
Once you've got the live CD burnt to a disc, restart your computer, boot off the CD, and accept all the default settings until you get to the screen where you can choose to create an image of the drive, or sync one drive directly to another drive. If you have both drives connected, you can simply use the device to device option, otherwise choose to create an image.
Assuming you chose to create an image, you will need to choose where the image will be stored, whether on an external drive, SSH server, or you can use the SAMBA option, which will allow you to connect to a Windows shared folder to store the image. Either of the latter two options will step you through a set of wizard screens to help you get hooked up to the server.
If you chose the local device option, you'll be prompted to select the drive that you want to save the image on. Make sure that this drive is formatted with NTFS or a Linux filesystem—you should not use a drive with FAT32 since the 4GB maximum file size will probably cause the cloning to fail.
At this point you'll be prompted to either save or restore a disk or partition—you should always use the disk image option here, and not single partitions, as you need the bootloader to stay intact on the new drive to make sure Windows is bootable. Since we're making an image file here, choose the first option, and follow through the wizard to select the drive and give it a name.
Creating the cloned drive image will take a while, but at the end you should see the option to shutdown or restart your PC. Laptop users, it's time to swap out the old hard drive with the new one, so we can restore the cloned image. If you did a direct disk to disk copy (which you probably did if you're on a desktop), you can skip the next step ("Finishing Up").
Restoring the Cloned Image
Now that you have the new hard drive installed in the PC, boot off Clonezilla again, follow through all of the same prompts until you get to the screen where you have to choose to save or restore the image. Choose the restoredisk option, choose the image to restore from (it's the one we just created above), and then choose the new disk that you want to overwrite.
You'll be prompted twice to make sure that you really want to overwrite the drive (make sure you've got the right drive installed—that is, the new, big, empty one), and the restore process will take a while. Once it's all done, you can remove the CD and reboot the PC from your new drive, directly into Windows.
Bonus: The Expert Linux Method
If you're a little more comfortable with Linux, there's any number of command-line tools like partimage or dd that can get the job done easily from an Linux Live CD. For instance, to copy one drive to another using dd, simply use the following command, substituting sda and sdb for your source and destination device names.
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
To create an image file instead, you can use a command similar to the following one suggested by reader @zarekthenerd, substituting sda for your source drive name, and modifying the path to your external hard drive:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/EXTERNAL/backup.img bs=4096
Once you've created the image, you can swap out your hard drive, boot from the live CD again, and then reverse the command:
dd if=/media/EXTERNAL/backup.img of=/dev/sda bs=4096
Finishing Up: Boot Up and Expand the Partition
Now that we're all done cloning the drive, all you need to do is boot up your PC, wait for Windows to finish figuring out that you have a new drive and installing the device drivers, and then we're ready to fix the one remaining problem—the current drive partition is the same size as the old drive.
If you're using Windows 7 or Vista, open up Windows Disk Management through the Start menu search box, or by right-clicking on Computer and choosing the Manage option. Once there, right-click the partition and choose Extend Volume to make the partition fill the entire disk.
At this point you should be able to head into Computer and see that your new hard drive is now nice and spacious.
If you're using Windows XP, you're going to have to take another route (it doesn't have a robust, built-in partition manager); you could choose to create another partition, or if you want to resize your primary partition, you can boot from the GParted Live CD and make the changes in there by clicking on the partition and using the Resize/Move button.
So have you ever upgraded from one hard drive to another one? Did you do the full reinstall, or use a cloning software? Share your experience in the comments.
The How-To Geek uses the SystemRescueCD and partimage to clone drives from the command-line . His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.