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I have a laptop with 2 harddrive bays. One bay holds a smaller WD Scorpio. This is the boot drive that holds the operating system (Windows 7), and it no longer large enough. The other bay holds a newer (3 months old) Hitachi hd500gb that I was using for storage and backup of programs. This drive is not bootable.

I want to set my computer to boot from the newer 500GB drive without losing any of the saved backed up info on it. Is there any way to do this? I want to be able to remove the old drive from the laptop when I'm done, in order to save weight and power. The laptop model is a gateway p-7805u.

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  • Kindly rephrase this question. Your title is just too long and the text is pretty unpunctuated. Also, kindly avoid phrases like '2 small' 'id' while posting. This is not a chat forum. Questions and answers here are archives for others. Treat it like your project report / thesis / dissertation.
    – Lord Loh.
    Oct 23, 2012 at 2:39

2 Answers 2

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A program like Acronis True Image 2013 is able to duplicate your current boot disk. You would need to partition the existing additional hdd into a 500GB parition.

All you need to do is hook both hdds to the machine, everything can be done within Windows, I would backup all important data of course.

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Here's how I would solve this problem:

  1. Back up the 500GB drive.
  2. Back up the 500GB drive again, in a different place.
  3. Migrate the WD drive to the Hitachi using a Drive imaging tool, leaving space on the big drive. This will wipe the contents of the 500GB Drive (hence the two backups)
  4. Disconnect the WD and boot from the Hitachi Drive. Create an additional drive (Partition) using the rest of the space.
  5. Copy the programs and data from the backup.

There are other ways to do this, but this is the cleanest, safest method that I can think of.

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