Ben installed an 80 Gb drive in my computer today and I just finished formatting it. Now I want to copy my C: drive files over and make the 80 Gb drive my new C:. Is there a program that will allow me to do it? I know I’ll have to redo the jumpers once it’s done.
Thanks for your help. Ben’s working tonight and his expertise is not available at the moment.
Yup. There are many programs that will do that.
You can copy drive to drive with DriveImage XML. It’s free. It runs from Windows.
Add the new drive as a slave. You’ll need to create a new partition on the new drive that is big enough to hold the contents of the old C drive. It will need to be a primary partition. Make it as big as you want. You don’t need to format it cause it will get formatted when you do the Drive to Drive copy. The new partition will also need to be set “active” since you’re going to want to boot from it.
You can do all that from the Windows Disk Management
Start >> Settings >> Control Panel >> Administrative Tools >> Computer Management >> Disk Management
Now you can run DriveImage XML to do a Drive to Drive copy. DriveImage XML will guide you through the process.
I’d also suggest burning a LiveCD image of GParted. The download will be an ISO file. You burn the ISO file to a CD. Your CD burning software should know how to handle an ISO file. After you burn the CD you should test it to make sure you can boot your computer from the CD. Put the CD in the drive and restart the computer. The computer should boot from the CD. If it doesn’t you may have to change the boot order in your BIOS so you can boot from the CD.
The LiveCD image of GParted is just so you can fiddle with the partitions on the new drive. It will allow you to resize the partition if necessary and do other partition management. It will allow you to do some things that the Windows Disk Management utility won’t do (like resize partitions). It will also allow you to mark and unmark partitions as “active”.
If you have at least one Maxtor drive installed you can use MaxBlast to prepare the new drive and copy the files from the old drive to the new drive. This knowledge base article explains the process: How can I copy / transfer all the data from my old drive to my new drive?
I was going to suggest copy and paste 
I was going to suggest installing the os fresh…to get rid of the problems that accumulate over time with windows installations…
Yes, if it’s a Windows machine this is a good idea if that installation has been around for a while. But then you have to extract all the files you want to keep, and reinstall all your software and reset all your settings. I’m just doing this with my Mac laptop, which is generally easier to do it with than a Windows machine, but still a bunch of work. Making a disk image is the most straightforward way, but will bring over all the flaws and accumulated crap in your Windows registry.