How To Upgrade Your Harddrive

Introduction

Upgrading your harddrive is not a very hard task, but you have to backup all your data from your previous harddrive. Changing your harddrive means you have to reinstall all your programs including your operating system. When you want to change your harddrive you have to choose the new harddrive very carefully. You have to search for the best harddrive for you so you won’t have space problems again. There are some new models of harddrives that offer up to 3 TB of space, more than enough for a casual user and sufficient for a user with a large media library. The easiest way to upgrade your harddrive is to buy a new harddrive and reinstall your operating system. If you have a desktop computer here is what you have to do.

Step 1

After you bought the new harddrive don’t sell your old one keep it in your computer so you can backup the data. You first have to open your computer case, remove the screws. After you opened the case insert the new harddrive into a harddrive slot and make the necessary connections. You will have to set one of the drives as master and the other one as slave, you can do this from your BIOS but if you can’t every harddrive has a jumper that can be placed in slave mode. You must set your old harddrive as slave.

Step 2

Now that you set up the two drives you can begin reinstalling the operating system on your new drive. Insert a bootable CD/DVD with the operating system and start reinstalling, make sure you use the new harddrive. You have to make new partitions on your new harddrive. You can make partitions from the bootable CD/DVD. Don’t forget to format these new partitions.

Step 3

After the installation is complete you must install all your drivers to make sure your computer works perfectly. After you installed all the drivers and all the hardware works perfectly you can start backing up the data. You can start by copying all the important documents, pictures and other files from your old harddrive. This process can take a while so you have to be really patient.

Step 4

After you made the backup you can now remove the old harddrive from your computer. You will have to open the computer case again and remove the harddrive.

Step 5

There are other methods to backup your data. You can clone your old harddrive and after put the clone on your new harddrive. If you want to clone your harddrive you must use specialized software. You can find software like Clonezilla on the Internet. Even if you clone your harddrive you will still have to reinstall your operating system. Cloning your harddrive is recommended if you have a laptop because it’s harder to make physical adjustments.

Step 6

If you are using a laptop you can always try to install an external harddrive that will give you more storing space. Cloning the harddrive can be more useful on laptops but you have to consider the costs of an external harddrive.

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