New Hard Disk Strategy...Need Help

I currently have 3 hard disks. 2 are about 3 - 4 years old and 200 - 350 gigs each, and 1 new (2 months old) 1 Terabyte drive.

My current C: drive hard drive is partitioned into C: and D: drives and keeps filing up and I can't/don't want to keep shuffling files around any longer. The D: partition is full as well.

The E: drive has about 160 gigs free and the G: (Terabyte drive) has about 770 gigs free.

I dual boot from the C: drive with Win 7 and have Win XP on another partition as I was unwilling to lose some of the functions and software loaded in XP. Have used XP very very little since loading Win7 but use it occasionally for a couple of programs that are very hard to reconfigure.

So I have a couple of options that I have thought of but could use some advice.

One. Use Acronis to make an image of my C: drive, Win 7 included, and install it on my G: drive. Then buy a new drive, probably another TB, and reinstall the image and OS to that new drive.

Two. Create an image on the G: drive and boot from that drive, get a new HD and use it for audio files etc.. Assuming I can change the drive letters and boot from that older G: drive.

Three?

I'll be up against the wall with any new downloads and need to change something but am not sure which way to go.

First off I'm amazed that you followed my description and situation so clearly.

Second. I LOVE that idea Mike. I can move my D: drive data to my large G: drive and can even create a partition on my big G: Terabyte drive if I want to keep my D: drive data separate somehow. I'll check and see about the other factors you mentioned as well. Maybe I'll keep a very small D drive partition so as to not scramble the drive letters.

I'll go check and see what pimple may appear with the plan.

Thanks so much for the help.

EDIT: It looks like Win XP is indeed on the D: drive along with a lot of programs that I'd like to keep operational as well. Simple programs like Office 2000 that won't run on Win7 and a few others. Still has my brain thinking of a few different options.

AND the partition software that I use to create my partitions.

mike_mccue


I don't know if Acronis will actually work out a OS transfer onto a new hard drive.

Isn't your system OS identified with the hard drive machine code it was installed on?

It's my recollection that Acronis will only help restore a OS on the original or extremely similar hard drive.

I read this same thing in a forum that was discussing such things. They thought a decent option was to reinstall Win7 on the new drive then copy the image to that new drive, then do a 'repair' of the OS. Either way If I replace my C: drive that currently has Win 7 on it then my Win XP OS will go along with it. Really don't want reinstall 2 OS's. Time for plan 'B.'

i use Acronis to back up stuff.

I had a flakey HD on another computer that I used for business. I dreaded the whole install new drive and install OS, and apps thing.

I bought a drive that came with cloning software. I followed the instructions and cloned the old drive on to the new one. The cloning made an exact bit by bit copy. Once the new drive was reconfigured as the main drive, it booted up and everything worked perfectly except one application. A simple reinstall over the old one had it working... total time ...under an hour total even including the one reinstall.

I recommend the cloning to copy an OS disk