I am currently thinking of purchasing a Maxtor 300GB Hard drive to replace my current 80GB in my HP Pavillion PC although I do not have any idea what it will involve me doing.

I understand the physical installation of the drive but everything else is beyond me, I know that it will involve me moving all the system files to my new drive yet again I am unsure on how this can be done.  Also, ontop of this my 80GB drive came with a partition installed so that I can recover my system in the event of system failure, would this be possible to retain the partition through the drive swap?

If someone could shed some light on how I install the drive, move everything to the bigger drive so that the system runs safely as if I just added an extra 220GB to the drive and would the partition remain?

Thanks in advance,
Hyped

You can buy external hard drives too which have to be connected by the USB input. I use something like that.

quote:

---

Originally posted by hypedupmonkey
ontop of this my 80GB drive came with a partition installed so that I can recover my system in the event of system failure,

---

As long as you backup and re-install everything from scratch then your good to go.

hypedupmonkey: What I'd suggest doing is inserting the drive into a seperate drive bay, and keeping it on a seperate drive channel so you have 300gb + 80 gb. that way you dont have to alter your system at all and you also get to keep the storage capacity of both drives.

I think he wants to put windows on the 300gig though

I'm not sure if HP includes backup software similar to Norton Ghost. If so, use that. Otherwise, you will need to acquire backup software which will make an exact copy of your drive.

Once you've done that, you need to do the following:

• Use the software to do a backup.
  
• Uninstall your current drive and install the new one.
  
• Restore the data from the backup onto your new drive.

I think it would be esiest just to do what lizard.boy said and just add it into a new slot keeping it all on the 80GB HDD, though -TheKing-'s probably would work too I personally would prefer the safe option.

Just install the hard drive speratly and keep your 80gb.

If you need to format the drive:
Right click my computer > Manage > Disk Management
Also, another common problem after installing a drive, you may need to go into your BIOS and enable the second drive.

When deciding whether to add the new drive as secondary (which many have suggested), you should take in account the age and relative performance of the current 80GB drive. 

The speed of hard drives, although discussed less often than capacity, varies as well -- and is important to the overall system performance.  If there is a difference, you want your system volume (Windows and applications) on the faster drive.

Assuming you decide to replace the drive (after which you could still format the old drive and add that as secondary), Maxtor offers their "MaxBlast" software that can, among other things, copy contents of one drive to another.  You can download it from Maxtor's website.  At least one of your drives must be Maxtor's to use the software -- but that's what you said you are getting.

MaxBlast might be able to move your "recovery" partition too, but my assumption would be that it won't.  Before you begin, see if there is any way for you to burn a recovery CD or DVD from it -- there usually is.  If not, you can either not worry about it and order the recovery discs from HP if/when you need them, or just keep the 80GB drive around for recovery purposes.

Yes HP does provide a recovery disk or you can download it from there website.