Is this possible? My initial inclination is to say "no", but I'm not 100% sure. I just bought a new 120 GB hard drive. My old one is ~30 GB, but I am only using up about 6-7 GB once I subtract all my documents, music, and videos. I'd like to move all those documents/music/videos to my external hard drive, then clone my operating system and programs from my 30 GB drive to a smaller partition on my 120 GB drive? Is this possible? I know hard drives write across the whole drive regardless of how much space is on it... If it's not possible, would there be any way to partition the space on the 120 GB hard drive after I have clone my old drive to it so that I'm not left with a 30 GB partition that I'm only using 6-7 GB of?
Why not just DRAG-and-DROP after Winders or Linux can split the 120Gb into a ~90Gb+~30Gb drive? There are utilities that will let you transfer your OS from one drive to the other. I would just move all the non-OS stuff out of the 30GB and let the OS run there alone. Are you THAT hard pressed for time that you can't wait?
I don't believe you can just drag and drop a hard drive with your operating system on it because there are files that are being accessed, used, and changing throughout the copying process, plus you need to copy the boot sector, etc as well.
I meant you can move all your "My Documents" and anything not in %systemroot% and/or %SystemDrive% or %TEMP% or %windir% to your LARGER drive, and let the 30GB drive do all the OS work, while you continue to grow the other drive with videos, other programs, etc. You CAN drag and drop all the music, videos, etc., to your other drive. Just quit all your applications to make sure they're not accessing the files.
Moving your OS to the newer, faster drive is worth your time. That 30gb drive is probably slow as Christmas... you'll see a nice boost by ghosting everything over to the new drive. Norton Ghost is the only one I've ever used and it works well. I'm sure there are others just as capable. HDClone is free but I've never tried it.
I'm about to try to clone it over to the 120GB drive right now. I'm in the process of formatting and partitioning the drive. Ok, I understand what you meant now. Normally, I would do this, but it's going to be on a laptop, so I don't want to have the hassle of plugging in an external drive whenever I want to access my videos, music, etc. I probably should've mentioned that in the first post. Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and partition the drive into a 30GB partition and a partition for the remainder. That seems to be the safest thing to do apparently, and 80 or so gigs for vids and music should be enough for now until I upgrade to a new computer.
Norton Ghost works well. I like Acronis though. Has better USB support and has a user-friendly GUI. If you have 2.5 enclosure you can put the new hard drive into it and plug it via usb to the laptop. boot up to acronis and clone the 30gb to the 120gb. Once your'e done just install the new hard drive into the laptop and you should be good. If you're using Vista then it has a built-in "partion magic" where you can split the drive into 2 partitions if that's what you'd like. Otherwise you'll need to use Partition Magic.
You are very smart sir because this is basically exactly what I'm doing. Bought and external enclosure when I bought the drive. Already downloaded and installed Acronis. I'm on XP, but it's disk manager has a built in partitioning wizard. I think all that is left for me to do is actually clone the drive...
Try Gparted (http://gparted-livecd.tuxfamily.org/). It's a Linux program that uses the GNOME environment; which, basically, means it's not Windows. You'll have to download the Gparted image and burn it to make a bootable CD. This may sound demanding, but, take my word, it'll work. Gparted is more than capable of what you're asking, and you may end up keeping the CD as a useful utility.
New laptop is locked and loaded. Posting this post from my laptop which now has a 120GB hard drive! MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
