Replacing my old hard drive with a new one

[Alchemist]

Hi! My old 80GB is in dire need of replacement so what I did was buy a new

160GB Seagate drive. Right now, my old drive serves as my boot drive but I want to transfer all files to my new drive since the system performance of my PC is already down that it takes minutes just to boot it. What do you think is the easiest way to transfer all the files without compromising any possible errors?

My friend told me that using the "Cloning Maxx" software can help although Seagate has its own program that I can use. I am concerned about partition sizes from both old and new drive because if I do use the cloning software, would there be problems in different drive sizes (old = 80GB, new=160GB)? Do I
need to defrag before and after the transfer?

[Harry]

Hey there Alchemist, congratulations for having a new Seagate drive. The one you just bought should have a disk included so basically you already have what you need for the smooth transition. You need to put your new drive in a slave mode (secondary) then put the software CD in the drive for booting. There's an option there that you need to choose in order to make the new drive as the new master. The instructions are basically easy so just follow them as it is..

If you did not see any accompanying software from your new drive, you can just download the software at the Seagate site and burn the downloaded .iso file to a disk as an image file.

Your new file is way larger than the old one so there's no need to defrag. Defragging must be done if you bough a new drive that has smaller capacity.

Hope this helps.