A Question Of Transfer Methods

[ekiM]

A friend of mine recently decided to upgrade his Laptop HDD. This causes a bit of dilemma though; How does he get all of his files from the old to the new?

 

-An External HDD is out of the question, and so are 64GB USB Keys (I know one or two of you were thinking it)

-He has no docking station or external HDD Enclosure to house his existing HDD

-Can Windows files be copy and pasted? Or is a clean install of Windows required

 

Thanks for the brainstorming guys!

[Turophiliac]

That's a tough one, unless someone else has a laptop with a removable drive, the external enclosures are pretty cheap for 2.5" drives

 

on Newegg

 

EDIT: i realize you're in the UK, so newegg probably wouldn't work, but the enclosures aren't bad price-wise.

[Dynamic]

They have adaptors now for him to hook up that drive to any system as he pleases to transfer his files. When i use to work for Fire Dogs (Circuit City) we had the adaptors since we had alot of customers trying to transfer files or whatever. Anyhow this is what i'm talking about....and i hope this helps...

 

http://www.bay-wolf.com/hddadapter.htm

[scr4wl]

He could try using the cd version of Windows easy transfer

 

Although that could take a very long time.

[Phil]

This is what I use. You can hook up SATA, IDE or notebook drives for data retrieval. Enclosure not required.

Edited December 2, 2008 by Phil

[Waco]

Just spend $10 on a cheap external USB enclosure. Install Windows on the new HDD and copy the files over when it's done.

[hardnrg]

I would use Acronis TrueImage to clone the old data to the new harddrive... no reinstall, no manual copying... I have a SATA drive in my laptop, so it's trivial for me... Seagate has a free version of TrueImage called DiskWizard (or something)

 

an IDE adaptor is cheap if it's not SATA... you'd only need one

 

cloning would happen on a host computer