Upgrade to a different drive

[fishingfanatic]

Beginner here, so I'm not sure if it can be done and I haven't been able to find anything about it online. My wife's pc has Vista Ult on an older Seagate 500gb drive which works fine.

I want to upgrade to Win 7, but I have a WD 320gb Blue that I would like to switch the OS to for better performance and the older will become the backup and main storage.

Not even sure if it's possible, but if I have to do a fresh install it simply takes a little longer, with all the updates,..... I'll likely do a fresh install anyway, that's the common sense method, hehe. makes too much sense for it to work...

Just curious to find out if that's even possible.



Edit: There's ghosting for doing multiple pcs with essentially the same thing on every one. Seen it done, but never tried it myself.

[Mr. Sneaky]

Depends how much space your stuff takes up on the 500. There's a few ways you can do it. You can use the win 7 cd/upgrade option and get it to back up your vista stuff and load it into win 7 install process.

Simplest and best solution would be to just do clean install on the new drive. Copy your stuff from old once you have everything running and just format the old once the xfer is complete.

[Mr. Sneaky]

If you really want to complicate things and do upgrade and keep all settings.

Get an imaging program like Acronis, do a disc copy to the new drive.

Once complete do windos 7 upgrade option and choose keep settings and files.

[Galcobar]

WD (Acronis True Image WD Edition) and Seagate (Disk Wizard) offer free limited editions of Acronis through their support websites.

[sswilson]

Originally Posted by Galcobar

WD (Acronis True Image WD Edition) and Seagate (Disk Wizard) offer free limited editions of Acronis through their support websites.

yeah, I've used it several times for going to larger drives from smaller ones and it works well. Not completely sure if it can go the other way, but wouldn't hurt to try transfering the Vista install over to it and then if it works, do the upgrade.