(this is a translation of the article in my German blog)

A few days ago I replaced the 60GB hard-disk drive in my good old Toshiba notebook with a new 250 GB HD. The old one has been filled with data almost completely for some time now, and so I have been looking for obsolete files and deleting them or copying files to external USB disks all the time lately. But the free disk space was often filled up again when my son Tim wanted to install his newest computer game…

Well, a modern big HD does not cost much, but I really had no nerves to reinstall the complete system plus address books, prgrams, and everything. Unlike with the desktop PC, a notebook has only one internal HD drive, so leaving the system HD and just adding a second one is no option.

The solution was easy: the software tool Acronis True Image allows you to clone the old drive, and it even stretches all existing partitions to the new bigger drive if you want (well, I had only one). So all I had to do was buying the drive (250 GB, EIDE, about 80 €) plus an external USB drive case (15 €). I first installed the new drive into the USB case (took me 3 mins), then cloning the old drive to the new one (took about one hour, thanks to the comfortable wizard you only have to press ‘next’ a couple of times, leaving all default settings as they were). Next was removing the old drive which means removing only one screw, the drive was behind a special lid so you don’t even have to open the notebook itself. Old drive oput, pushing the new one in, no jumpers, no nothing, switching on again, and…

… it was running!! Windows booted flawlessly, no error messages, no new hardware found, nothing!! 🙂

Of course the old drive was installed into the USB case.

If I had knewn before how easy this is, I surely would have done so a long time ago. But now it’s time to think about how to fill the new drive, so many GB’s want to be filled 🙂