Installing a brand new HDD

[ub3rman123]

My hard drive has recently been making knocking sounds, so in the interest of not losing all my stuff, I decided to replace it before it dies on me. So here's the situation I'm in: I have a brand new hard drive, blank, not formatted, no OS on it, nothing, and I have the old hard drive with all my stuff on it that I want to keep and transfer to the new one. Can someone walk me through exactly the steps from plugging in the hard drive to formatting it so it'll work? I've tried doing this all on my own but it's not working.

[samadchaz]

Model?

what steps you actually tried yet?

Try this one:

Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Storage (in Left Pane)->Disk Management

 

you will see your Non-formatted(RAW) Disk there, if not there is a problem.

 

Create Partitions(Right click) and format it.

[ub3rman123]

It's a Samsung Spinpoint F3, 1 tb, SATA cables. OS I'm on is Windows 7.

 

Here's what I've done before:

 

1. Formatted the drive using what you said earlier

2. Used a program (I forget which, but I assume it's unimportant since it appears to have worked) to clone files from the old HDD to the new one by having both in the PC at the same time.

3. Assumed that the program copied the OS as well as the regular files.

4. Removed the old HDD, booted the computer, specified in the boot to set the boot device as the new HDD.

5. Got a black screen with a flashing _.

 

And that's where I'm stuck at.

[blove]

Sounds like your cloning software did not get the Win7 system partition. Replace Your Hard Drive Using Free Windows 7 Tools is a good article about using Windows Backup, but you would need another drive large enough to hold a system image and a cd burner to make a recovery disk.

[aruless]

Sounds more that u did a back up only, theres a lot of software for cloning, acronis, x-clone, etc. but this one is easy to use and free http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/ there u only need to select: clone-partition clone and is almost done, the last thing u need to do is to select the source and destiny disk simple, and if u still need help the faq in their website is quite nice too.

 

o/

[ub3rman123]

Found what the problem was: The freeware I was using wasn't copying the OS data, so the computer wouldn't boot. My father secured a copy of Acronis from his work for me, and it seems to be working fine now.

 

Thanks for the help, everyone!

[youknowita]

you can clone partition with partition wizard. it is a free software. i used before.