How To Transfer Data From Your Primary Hard Drive To A New Hard Drive

If you're just beginning to build your own computers, one problem you might encounter is how to transfer data from your primary hard drive to a new hard drive.

The process itself is not complicated, but it can be confusing if you've not done it before - and especially if you have a large amount of data to transfer. This is a common tasks when  building a new computer.
As always, practice makes perfect - do this a couple of times and soon you'll have no issues transferring data from one drive to the next.
In this article, let's look at how you can transfer the data from your main hard drive over to a new one.

1. Get A Good Imaging Software
The first thing to do when you want to transfer data from your primary hard drive to a new one is to get a good imaging program (my favorite is  Acronis True Image). Imaging software is very important because it backs up your computer hard drive's data into an image, then enables you to restore it into another hard disk. Perfect for what we're trying to accomplish here.
 

Using  Acronis True Image to image your hard drive

2. Do A Backup Of Your Data
Once you've installed the imaging program, just image the entire primary hard drive into an image. This image can usually be stored on a DVD - I suggest you do that instead of storing the image on a hard drive. Once the backup image is prepared, do an integrity check by seeing if the files you backed up are still there. Good imaging programs like Acronis True Image allow you to explore individual files in a backup image.
3. Restore Data To New Hard Drive
Right. Next step is to take that backup image on the DVD, and restore it onto the new hard drive using your imaging program. This process should only take maybe 10 minutes (much faster than copy the data directly from hard drive to hard drive). And that's all you need to do to transfer data from your primary hard drive to a new one.
 

Transferring data from one hard drive to another is not difficult
4. An Alternative Solution?
Well, you might think that an alternative solution is to just copy data from your primary hard drive onto an external hard disk, then copy the data onto a new hard drive. No can do! Direct copying of data is not only slow, it does not bring over many of the settings you need. The only sure way to bring everything across to the new hard disk (short of a complete re-format of the OS) is to use an imaging program.
Conclusion
And that's all there is to it. All you need to know about how to transfer data from your primary hard drive to a new one. Remember that the above process is not as complicated as it seems - do it once and you'll be more confident in subsequent trials. Until next time, happy computer building!
Want to unlock more mysteries of the venerable computer hard disk? Here's an excellent guide.

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