I would like to make a copy of my C drive, on it is only programs and the Windows OS.

Its only 150Gb with 22Gb left and Id like to put in a new hard (larger and newer) drive and keep the small one as a back-up

Both SATA drives.

There seems to be lots of stuff out there to do this but I’m a bit lost with it all, ISO image, mirror, partition?

Ideally I’d like to download something, tell it the drive to copy, and where to copy it to.

When its done, switch off the computer and put the new drive where the old one was and then turn it all on again without any grief.

I also have no idea what a partition is and am concerned I may turn my 500Gb drive into a 150!

Any pointers would be really appreciated.

Think of a partition as a slice of hard drive cake. If you have 500GB, then a single 50% / 250GB partition will result into 2 hard drives C + E for instance appearing on your desktop / my computer screen.

You can have as many partitions as you like, however it’s not practical to have to many. Through the Windows OS, it’s best to partition prior to adding data / drive clone information. You can do it afterwards but you will need to get third party partition software to do it right.

In my view, you should really remove your old drive, add new, re-install windows and apps, then re-connect your old drive as a slave / additional drive. This way you’ll have a much better, faster, cleaner install for your PC (something heavy users should do about once a year anyway) and an intact original drive incase you’ve forgotten anything or need to revert to your old set up. After a few days / weeks of use and everything feels fine, you can back up the files you want from the old smaller drive to the new one, then format and use exclusively for storage.

As a bike analogy, think of it as stripping your bike down and re-building with fresh grease, cables and a new chain. You can clone, but it inherently takes a long time, never really works as expected and copies all the bloat over that you don’t need.

Just in case, can I recommend a separate backup of any photos/videos/music/important documents to an external drive or dvds before you start. Sounds like you’re on a learning curve and losing all your files (whilst effective!) is an unpleasant lesson.

all photos and music and videos are on the slave drive (D drive)

All programs on the main (C drive) (to be upgraded).

Most photos and most music on external drive too.

All work done from Dropbox or external solid state drive.

Can anyone recommend software to do the copying?

I don’t appear to have a spare socket for another hard drive so would need to remove the D drive first, put the new drive into that space and plug it in and do the copy from there.

If you’ve little or no data on the C drive yet are using 130Gb of space, WTF have you got installed?

No matter what I’d suggest you try running Ccleaner or TFC first, to clear out the temporary crap, that built up over time & really doesn’t need to be transfered to a new drive (again as above I’d suggest an new installtion of windows over a clone any day of the week, but you may not be confident with that).

I don’t appear to have a spare socket for another hard drive

Is this a laptop or a desktop?
For a laptop an inexpensive drive caddy would be the solution, for a desktop you should be able to connect 4 drives to the motherboard using Sata cables, which are cheap to buy (though if your limited for internal space another caddy maybe the way to go).

The option you want is to clone the drive, I tend Acronis’s disc director IIRC (at least I think it does cloning, as I say I don’t tend to clone, just re-install), though there are lots of free bit and pieces around that will do the same job. Also if you clone the drive onto a bigger HDD but still end up with the same sized partition, that partition can be extended using other software.

If you’ve little or no data on the C drive yet are using 130Gb of space, WFT have you got installed?

good question!

Folders are:
Windows 11GB
Windows.old 1 Gb
Users 38GB 😯
Temp 0GB
Program Data >3GB
Program Files (x86) 4.7GB
Program Files 2Gb

I seem to be missing quite a bit then because that adds up to about less than 55GB

Oh, its a desktop Dell Precision T3400 (oldish)

I have this on a laptop I’ve just re-installed, the drive says it’s full, the interesting utility I’ve just tried called spacesniffer agrees with my quick tot up (like yours) that there ain’t that much data on the drive…
Dunno why though, as I retained the old full hdd and put in a spare I had, and am yet to investigate it properly.

Run one of the temporary file cleaners, if you haven’t already (windows one is ok but those are better IMO), then run chkdsk to see if that clears it up.

XP, Vista or W7?

I’m guessing one of the latter two as it’s x64. Look at disk manager (right-click ‘computer’ and pick ‘manage’), that’ll show you how it’s partitioned. Chances are there’s a small system partition used by W7 for its own nefarious purposes, the OS partition (your C:\ drive) and a recovery partition installed by your PC’s manufacturer. There may also be a ‘data’ partition defined.

Reinstalling from scratch has its pros and cons, it’s not something I’d blindly suggest as a one size fits all solution. It’s a good de-cluttering exercise, but you’ll need to reinstall all your programs and find the correct drivers.

If you want to clone it, I’d suggest doing it via gparted / parted magic from a Linux live CD. Removing your data drive before you start is a Really Good Idea. Are you sure it’s a separate physical drive?

Its on Vista.

there was 7mb of unnallocated space on it

think I’ll just go for a re-install of Windows and keep the old hard drive as a spare in case the PC goes “pop”

Vista has a well known problem with ‘system restore’ gradually eating up your hard drive space!

I did this a couple of weeks ago using Clonezilla, following this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=490n_VoldUg . Seemed pretty easy to follow, and haven’t had any problems since. Just make sure you have another computer/smartphone to watch the video on while you’re doing it.

acronis True Image is fairly good for imaging a drive, and you might find it a bit more beginner friendly than some of the others suggested. As for finding out what is using the space on your current drive, Treesize would be your friend.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

http://www.jam-software.com/treesize/

I the end I used Macrium Reflect (free ) 😀 to clone my 149 GB hard drive to my new 500Gb hard drive and then extended the partition in disc management

Computer working splendidly.

Thanks for everyone’s input.