I have been waiting for my system hard drive to fail for a while. It’s not been a bad drive, except for the constant warnings that it’s got a limited time to live – wait, isn’t that the definition of a bad drive? I guess it could be worse, but…
Anyway, last night I bit the farm, kicked the bullet, and bought a bucket – bought a new 1TB drive, and installed it. The process for doing this on Windows involves installing the new drive as a secondary (internal or external), cloning the system drive to the new drive, and then fixing the partitions.
I chose AOMEI Backupper to do the cloning (by the recommendation of various sites, after googling). Installation was easy enough; you can get the capability for cloning by spamming your social networks or buying a software license for $40 USD. (If you didn’t see me spam you, well, you can guess which way I chose.)
Cloning was simple; choose to clone drives, select the destination and target drives, and wait.
After cloning, you then switch the drives around (actually, what I did was move the new primary in place and replace my old secondary, which I’d removed in order to replace the primary.)
That left the partitioning – my old drive was smaller than the new one, and the cloned image meant that I had this dangling partition, empty and unused. My English teachers from way back when said that I should never allow dangling partitions – or was that participles? – so that needed to be addressed, too.
Since I’d already used AOMEI to clone the drive, I decided to try their partition assistant program to fix the partitions; it actually worked about as easily as one could hope, and I’m typing on my laptop now with a giant boot partition on the new, faster drive.