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Laptop drives
Ninehigh - 4/12/10 at 12:39 AM

A few weeks ago I found an old hard drive out of my stepson's old laptop (screen cracked so it got replaced under the insurance and they sent the drive back)

This drive has far more capacity than mine but I imagine they're the same physical size. It's got some windows on it (I think Vista premium compared to my Vista normal) and I was planning on cloning my drive somehow.. However the thought occurs to me to just back up all my stuff onto missus's comp (via a shared folder on a large drive) and just swap my drive to the bigger one.

Thing is will the other copy of windows be expecting the laptop it came out of or will it just act like I've not turned it on in two years?

britishtrident - 4/12/10 at 07:41 AM

You will need to re-install windows from the install or recover cd for the laptop the drive is fitted to.
You may also run into physical compatibility problems --

You could just buy a USB external caddy for the drive off ebay for less than £5

RazMan - 4/12/10 at 10:29 AM

Swapping drives rarely works and you will find that all sorts of drivers are missing or incompatable.
You are always better off reformatting and starting again.

Surrey Dave - 4/12/10 at 01:06 PM

You can make an image of your existing working drive and copy it to the larger drive then everything should work the same, 'Drive Image' 'Norton Ghost' ' Acronis True Image' will do this.

MikeRJ - 4/12/10 at 03:31 PM

Do they have the same interface? Older laptops (and desktops) used the IDE (aka PATA) interface, newer ones use SATA.

Ninehigh - 4/12/10 at 04:13 PM

I've not seen both drives, but both laptops were bought at the same time.

I was just going to make a straight copy of everything onto missus's comp and then format/copy back.

Surrey Dave - 4/12/10 at 05:59 PM

quote:

I've not seen both drives, but both laptops were bought at the same time. I was just going to make a straight copy of everything onto missus's comp and then format/copy back.



From what I recall that will not work, because it doesn't necessarily make the drive you are copying to bootable, I dont know enough to explain the nitty gritty but i'm sure a straight copy procedure will not do it, must be down to windows not being able to copy every file, if you make an .iso image of your hard drive you can copy it exactly, if straightforward it's faster than loading windows ,then the software then ,data +all the relevant drivers will be there already.

Ninehigh - 4/12/10 at 09:01 PM

Aha, missus knows about iso files, I shall ask her about it!