Long story real short, I have a 80 gb hard drive in a 3 year old computer. It is full and I am getting a bigger HD cause I do music/movies and the wife does pics, pics, and more pics. I want to know how I go about installing the new HD and moving (copying) everything on the old HD to the new one (everything on there). I want to get rid of the old HD or put it in an old computer for the youngsters or something.

Thanks to all!

Before you start, make sure everything you would like to keep is backed-up onto reliable media, such as DVD's for example.

Fitting a new drive is not a straight forward task, how would you measure your ability/confidence to physically install a new hard drive? Have you done it before?

Basically you would need some drive copying software, the ability to set up a second drive as slave to your current drive, copy the old drive to the new drive and then remove the old drive to replace it with the new drive as master.

A rough idea of what you will be doing with the hardware...

If you don't feel confident with this then either get a friend who does this kind of thing regularly or look up a pro.

This post worries my slightly as I had a friend that wanted to defrag his drive and ended up formatting it instead... he lost every single one of his daughter's wedding photographs... I could have retrieved them for him but he didn't tell me about it until it was too late. His wife was devastated.... so don't be daring unless you are really really really sure you can't lose anything.

first of all your 80gb harddrive will be set as master thats if you only have one harddrive in your computer and it will have a version of windows on, personally i would put the other harddrive in and set it to slave if its an IDE harddrive but if its a sata harddrive your wont have to mess around with master and slaves, once the harddrive is in, go to controol panel and go to administrive tools and add the harddrive in disk managment. Once thats done it will show in mycomputer and then you can just copy/cut paste anything accross,