Topic Title

I recently purchased a new 2.5" hard drive (60 gig @ 7200 RPM) and 2.5" external hard drive case for my laptop. I would like to take my old hard drive (40 gig @ 5400 RPM) and replace it with the new 60 gig. My question is can I install the 60 gig hard drive in the external case and copy the entire 40 gig hard drive onto the 60 gig and then switch the hard drives. It seems like it should work, but I know how stupid computers can be at times. Thank you very much for all that can help.

Is your 40GB drive also external?
If so, there are no problems.
If the external HD becomes another drivename, you can switch the drivename under the computer management console. I don´t know the correct description because I use the german version of XP
Under Volumemanagement you can switch the drive names if they are wrong. So everything should work.

Martell

The hard drive I want to replace is the current internal hard drive. I was wondering if I transferred ALL of the information from one hard drive to the other, including operating system, which is Windows 2000 Pro, would cause any problems when I swap them. Sorry that I didn't included that information earlier. I don't know if I ABSOLUTELY NEED to load the operating system on the new hard drive, which I am attempting to avoid.

Oh, the 40GB is your drive with your operating system.
In this case you couldn´t copy from one to another.
You need to clone or image your 40GB. You need therefore for example Arcronis True Image or Norton Ghost.
First image the partition. How many partitions do you have?
You can`t copy the image to the imaged partition. So you need a second partion or a external hard drive.
So write the image to the external disk, if you haven´t partitioned the 40GB HD.
Than copy the image to the 40GB HD. Switch the Harddrives. Enter the Boot CD fom Acronis or Ghost and restore the image from the 40GB.
If you don´t switch the size, you will get two partitions. One 40GB and one 20GB on your new 60GB.

Martell

The last hard drive I bought (WD) came with software that did this for you. It asked if you wanted to make the new drive bootable and copy the present OS as well as setting up partitioning if you wanted it. After doing this, you can switch the drives and there was provision for copying the additional partitons.

Thanks to all that helped. I ended up downloading a trial cloning software, True Image 9.0, which copied everything to my new hard drive. After the copy was complete I switched the hard drives and everything works great. You would never know I switched the drives. I didn't have to have to go through the hassel of loading O.S, software, personal settings and transfering data. Thank you very much for all that helped.