IT Professionals

Considering Some Windows Migration Options

Posted by on Dec 7, 2007 | 9 Comments

I have been putting off a family related project for sometime now, largely due to me living in a different area than them over the past few months. Anyway, my brother is a serious World Of Warcraft player and is quite happy with his Windows XP Home box. Unfortunately, as the expansion packs keep coming, his hard drive space is becoming something of a premium.

So here in January, I plan on upgrading his hard drive to a 250 GB Seagate Barracuda. The challenge however, is deciding on the software that will be best for the job. After doing some research, I think I want to stick to the Acronis line of options, as their software has never once failed me, unlike that of other competitors. The exact application I am thinking of using is Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0. If it is half as good as other Acronis products, I suspect it will produce a simple transfer of his XP install over to the new drive.

And with that said, I would like to point to you, the readers, for additional thoughts. Are there other applications I ought to be considering instead? I am open to pretty much anything with the strong exception of anything using the brand Symantec, as they have produced nothing I will ever use again. Short of that, the comments section is open.

[tags]hard drive migration, drive clone, World Of Warcraft, hard disk[/tags]

  • Rich Grooms

    Matt, I recently replaced the failing hard Drive on my wife’s Dell Dimension 4700 with a Western Digital 500 GB drive. I found their software for transferring data quite easy to use. She now has a ridiculous amount of free space on her hard drive. Make sure to check for the latest Bios updates too.

  • Janos

    Hey, Matt

    I’ve just upgraded my notebook HD and had no problem at all “cloning” my old HD to the new one using one of the cloning tools from UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD). Sure, it does not have the fancy GUI, so I would not suggest it to everyone, but it got the job done.

  • Louie

    If you get a Maxtor drive it comes with their version of Arcronis.

  • Lee Houde

    I’ve used “Drive2Drive” with 100% success and satisfaction. I don’t know if it has been updated for XP or Vista, but I highly recommend the product. I used it in my box with 2 hard drives installed, one as my working drive and one as my backup. Periodically I’d use it to mirror my working drive to the backup drive. It creates a perfect mirror of the drive being copied.

  • Peter Kaulback

    I’ve used DiscWizard http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=DiscWizard&vgnextoid=d9fd4a3cdde5c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD or http://tinyurl.com/27y63t which is a program from Seagate and Acronis for hard drive migration. It is free and very easy to use. In fact I used it twice to migrate 2 separate customers upgrading to 250 gb drives like yourself. I highly recommend it!

  • Larry C Royal

    Casper XP has always come through for me and is far less complicated than Acronis or Ghost

  • http://www.phoward.com Paul Howard

    I would use DriveImage XML (http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm) – which is free disk imaging software.

    You can install it on a PE disk or direct to the running OS and just clone the drive onto the new drive.

  • Pat Carver

    You say that you have other products from Acronis. If that is the case, you might check out the disk cloning options built into TrueImage. Use the recovery boot disk and check out the options. For basic drive upgrades, this is probably all you need.
    Pat C

  • Paul D.

    I just came across G4L which use to be called Ghost for Linux: http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l.

    I’m in the process of testing it myself, but it may be worth a look.