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Originally Posted by EarleD
I have a Dell 8400 with a 40 GB HD and am running out of HD space. I want to upgrade my HD but really don't want to reinstall windows and all my software, not to mention my network settings. Is there a way to just add the larger HD and copy an image of the smaller drive to the larger drive? Circuit City said Norton Ghost would work... but I don't have too much confidence in their so called experts. Any help would be appreciated.
Earle
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If you want a dead-simple, no thought required solution, simply buy a 500GB external USB hard drive and plug it in. It's $130 retail, but can be found on sale for about $100 sometimes. Set this as your D: drive (or whatever) and use it for all your personal data, etc. No need to bother with cloning or reinstalling Windows.
SethH said that internal drives are cheaper than external, but as I've looked the past year or so, I've found that they are very close in price.
The next level of complexity is to buy an internal drive and install it. This is not hard; I've done it several times with Dell computers. And again, just make it a data drive.
Or, as you ask, you can do a full clone, install an internal drive, and use it as your new system drive (the C: drive). If you do that, keep the 40GB as well; you might find it useful for backups, etc.
Finally, you can install a new internal drive and do a full reinstall of all your software. This is time consuming: my experience is that this takes an entire weekend to fully restore all applications, data, and most of your settings. And you'll be fiddling for the next two weeks getting things just so. But, it also cleans things up, often fixing little quirks that had developed as you added and removed programs over the years. And might prompt you do house clean and get rid of data and apps you no longer want.