How To Upgrade A Hard Disk Drive

My first hard drive was just 40 MB. Back then, circa 1990, the only reason you'd upgrade a hard drive was to increase your storage space. But, today, with the recent introduction of new hard-drive technologies--not to mention the constant increase of aerial density on the hard-drive platters themselves--replacing a hard disk often results in a drive that is not only more capacious, but also markedly faster and quieter.

But how do you upgrade your customers' disk drives and transfer their data to the new disk without crashing their systems? Currently, the two most popular programs for transferring all the data--including the OS--from a customer's original hard drive to a new hard drive are Symantec's Norton Ghost 9.0 and Acronis' True Image 8.0. For this recipe, I chose the latter.

Using True Image, the first step is to create a boot disk or diskettes with a portable version of the True Image software. Fortunately, the software automatically performs this task during installation. In this Recipe, I'll focus on cloning hard drives for the purpose of upgrading. You can clone any hard drive to any other hard drive, provided the target drive meets or exceeds the current capacity in use on the original drive. Also, you can clone from one manufacturer's drive to another, from USB to IDE, from SATA to IDE, from SCSI to PC Card or IEEE 1394 (FireWire), or any combination thereof.

The target drive need not be partitioned or formatted, but any data on that drive before cloning will be erased permanently. Also, be careful when selecting the source drive. If you accidentally configure the software incorrectly--for example, setting the target as the source, and the source as the target--you'll wipe out the target drive completely during this process.

Getting To Work

The simplest scenario involves replacing or adding a new IDE drive to a system that already has an older IDE drive. To do this, boot from your True Image rescue disk, select Disk Clone and, using the wizard, select the drive you want to clone. Next, select the target drive. Within minutes--or hours, depending on how much data you're cloning--you'll have an exact mirror-image copy of the older hard drive.

Cloning an IDE drive to a SATA drive, or vice versa, is almost as straightforward but with one key difference: Currently, only a handful of SATA controllers are available, the majority of which are made by Silicon Image, VIA and Promise. The Promise controller is, strictly speaking, a RAID controller; as such, it will not be detected automatically by the True Image software. However, when I tested the VIA and Silicon Image SATA controllers, both were automatically detected by the True Image software.

Because Windows XP does not natively include SATA drivers, when you attempt to boot from the new, cloned SATA hard drive, you'll discover that Windows XP will not load. To prevent this, be sure to enable the SATA controller in the BIOS and load the drivers into Windows before cloning. Should you forget to do this, a repair installation of Windows will be required to make the machine bootable again without losing your customer's data.

Finally, to upgrade a laptop's hard drive, you'll need a traditional desktop system on hand. Most laptops allow for the installation of only one hard drive. But by using an inexpensive laptop hard-drive adapter, you can cable both the original and new laptop drives to a desktop PC.

Using two adapters and two laptop hard drives, cable both drives temporarily to the desktop PC. Then boot to your True Image CD or diskettes. Clone the drives. Then install the newly cloned drive back into the laptop. It's really that simple! Once you've verified that the newly cloned drive is bootable, you can safely mount the drive permanently, then close up the case. *

Carey Holzman is president of Discount Computer Repair in Glendale, Ariz.