Joseph Blough Jr. plans to upgrade his hard drive. How does he move Windows, his applications, and his files to their new, larger home?
I’m not going to discuss the hardware issues of making sure your new drive is compatible or of physically installing it. See How to Install a New Hard Drive. If you have a laptop, read Mobile Computing: Upgrade Your Notebook’s Hard Drive, as well.
So let’s get on with copying everything from the old hard drive to the new one. You can’t just drag-and-drop copy the files, as that will miss your boot sector, important parts of Windows, and any hidden partitions. If your computer came with Windows installed, there’s a good chance that you’ve got a hidden partition that you’ll need on the new drive should you have to reinstall the OS.
There are two approaches here: Imaging and cloning. Imaging backs up everything on your hard drive to a single, very large file on a separate piece of media–usually an external hard drive. Cloning directly copies the contents of one drive onto another. I’m going to discuss cloning here because, for this particular job, it’s probably the better choice. See Should I Image the Hard Drive or Clone It? for more on these two approaches.
Cloning requires that your PC have access to both hard drives simultaneously. If you have a desktop, you can install the new one as a second internal drive (which will become the first one after you remove the older drive). If you have a laptop, or if you just don’t want to fiddle with 
For cloning software, consider EASEUS Disk Copy. This free program downloads as a .iso image file, which you can use to create a bootable CD. (If double-clicking the .iso file doesn’t launch a disc-burning program, download and install the free ISO Recorder.) When you boot from the CD, it will take you into a simple wizard-driven cloning program. (My thanks to coastie65, a regular of the Answer Line forum, for pointing me in EASEUS’ direction.)
Disk Copy misses one important feature: You can’t resize the partitions–an odd omission since the whole point of upgrading your hard drive is to get a bigger one. Luckily, if you have Windows 7 or Vista, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. See Resize Your Partitions for instructions.
Oddly, this wizard also doesn’t let you enlarge partitions. But then, once the job is done, it’s easy enough to enlarge your partitions in the main EASEUS program.
Unfortunately, EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition won’t work in 64-bit environments. You don’t need it for Vista or Windows 7, since you can use EASEUS Disk Copy and Windows’ own partition-resizing tools. But if you’ve got the x64 version of XP, you’ll have to pay $40 for the EASEUS Partition Master Professional.
Add your comments to this article below. If you have other tech questions, email them to me at answer@pcworld.com, or post them to a community of helpful folks on the PCW Answer Line forum.