Absolute Beginners Guide to Upgrading and Fixing Your PC

Upgrade #3: Replacing Your Existing Hard Drive

It's one thing to add a second hard drive to your system. It's quite another to replace your existing hard drive you know, the one that holds all your existing data and software programs, as well as your operating system.

Physically, replacing the drive is as simple as taking the old one out of your system unit and plugging the new one into the same spot. The big challenge in replacing a hard drive is how to transfer your existing stuff from the old drive to the new one.

One approach is to back up all your data and programs from your old drive, and then restore them to your new drive after it has been installed. This is a big pain in the rear, but it works.

A better approach is to install the new hard drive in your system unit as your master drive, but keep the old drive installed as your second, or slave, drive. When you do this, you can then copy all the data and programs from the old (now slave) drive to your new (master) drive. Plus, you get the benefit of having two hard drives on your system and every little bit of storage space helps!

If you take this approach, I recommend purchasing a software program to help you with the disk copying chores. The best of these programs are PowerQuest's DriveCopy (www.powerquest.com/drivecopy/) and Symantec's Norton Ghost (www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/). These programs pretty much automate the process of creating an exact mirror of your old drive on your new drive including the operating system and all your data and applications.

Here's how you want to replace an existing hard drive:

1. Follow the instructions in the Upgrade #2 section to install and configure the new hard drive in your system unit. You should initially set the jumper settings to make the new drive your slave drive.

2. Run the drive copy software to copy the contents of your old drive to your new drive.

3. Get back inside your system unit and change the jumper settings on your old drive to the slave setting, and then change the jumper settings on your new drive to the master setting.

4. Assuming that your new hard drive is working fine as your main drive C:, reformat your old hard drive (which should now be drive D:) to wipe off all the old data, applications, and operating system.

Your new hard drive should now mirror the operation of your old drive but with more free space, presumably. You can now use your old hard drive for additional data storage.