New hard drive

[Liz65]

Just bought 250gb IDE drive. I'm not looking forward to re-installing everything on to it. Is there a simpler method. Thanks for all replies.

[vehelpfulguy]

Well if you only have one hard drive you can install this in the PC case as a second hard drive (a slave).

Then you do not need to reinstall anything.

[vehelpfulguy]

Another option is to save a complete image of your existing drive with a product like Ghost, see here:

http://www.symantec.com/home_homeoffice/produc ts/overview.jsp?pcid=br&pvid=ghost10

Then restore the Ghost image on to the new hard drive.

Ghost is clever enough to not care if the source hard drive was not the same size as the target hard drive.

The only problem you may have is where to store the Ghost image while you are removing the master drive.

I have a Master and a Slave hard drive.

I use Ghost to save the image of the Master on to the Slave drive.

Then I can restore the image from the Slave back to the Master.

Using this method I can "install" Windows XP from a Ghost image on the slave in about 5 minutes.

[Liz65]

Brilliant, vhg! You have just saved me from hours of mental anguish.

[Paulst30]

If it is a MAxtor Drive you have you can use MaxBlast, it is a far better program than Norton Ghost. Not sure if you can use it for any drive, worth a try