Swapping a laptop HDD?

[Zephik]

I've just realized that sitting in my old beat up Inspiron 9200 is a 80GB HDD, whereas in the one I'm using now (Inspiron 9300) is only a 40GB HDD thats down to under a gigabyte of free storage space (14GB for WoW!? :eek:)

I could probably just swap the two drives, but the 80GB HDD has Ubuntu installed on it and the one I'm on right now has XP, which is what I want to use. Its too much of a bother to use Linux as a main OS. That, and there are things I can't transfer over, like MS Office and things like that. Then of course some other stuff that I would have to try and get working, bah, its just not worth the effort. I have this laptop setup just the way I want/like it too.

So is there any way to copy this hard drive over to my other one? I have around 500GB of external storage by the way. lol. It would just be nice to have more space on the main hard drive so I don't have to constantly reroute everything to the externals, which sucks sometimes because then I can't use certain things unless they are plugged in or with me where I'm at.

[XcOM]

you could use http://www.acronis.co.uk/ and download a free trial of true image and do it that way, or if you have nero installed load backITUP and cancel the wizard, then select drive backup wizard, this will then ask you which partition to use, than tell you how meny DVD's you will need,

Change drive and load the nero backup dvd and it will restore you system with the full partition on the new drive no problems,

from what i've read use arconis to make an image of your current drive, create a recovery cd from acronis, place that image on your external drive, change the drives over and load from the acronis recovery cd you made and restore the image to the new drive.

[BuzzKillington]

Sell the old laptop and buy a 320gig 7200rpm laptop drive for 90 bucks. :oP

If you're selling the old laptop minus hdd and willing to throw it on ebay I'd love to take it off your hands. My girlfriend has the e1505 which is pretty much the same laptop I believe and her screen has been buzzing... I don't know if it's Mobo or LCD related. Also, Her charger is screwed up so I bought a non-oem charger... big mistake.

[Zephik]

Sell the old laptop and buy a 320gig 7200rpm laptop drive for 90 bucks. :oP

If you're selling the old laptop minus hdd and willing to throw it on ebay I'd love to take it off your hands. My girlfriend has the e1505 which is pretty much the same laptop I believe and her screen has been buzzing... I don't know if it's Mobo or LCD related. Also, Her charger is screwed up so I bought a non-oem charger... big mistake.

Well here is the thing with the old laptop. It has no keyboard, touch pad, screen, wireless card or chassis except what the motherboard sits in. Yea... I've been salvaging from it for a good year or two now. lol

Still works though, just plug in everything you need. Its basically a super portable desktop. ^_^

But I don't plan on selling it. Its worth more to me as a backup 'puter or when I feel like dinkering around with linux distros.

[Zephik]

you could use http://www.acronis.co.uk/ and download a free trial of true image and do it that way, or if you have nero installed load backITUP and cancel the wizard, then select drive backup wizard, this will then ask you which partition to use, than tell you how meny DVD's you will need,

Change drive and load the nero backup dvd and it will restore you system with the full partition on the new drive no problems,

from what i've read use arconis to make an image of your current drive, create a recovery cd from acronis, place that image on your external drive, change the drives over and load from the acronis recovery cd you made and restore the image to the new drive.

Thanks XcOM!

I think I'll try Acronis or a similar program. I never thought about making an image file of my current hard drive, then placing that on one of my externals and loading it from the external. I think I still remember how to change the boot sequence/options too because I think I tried that with Ubuntu once.