Advice on Upgrading Harddrive on Windows 8 Laptop.

[Tribble puncher]

I have an HP Laptop running Win8 as title says. Looking to Upgrade from Stock HDD to a 1 T.B. 7200 H.D.D. What I'm not sure of is if I can Clone everything from the old drive to the new, pop in the new drive, and have it boot up. or if I will need to Order Recovery disks from HP, or if the Disks I made when I bought this computer will suffice. I know Win8 (no go back to Win7 jokes please...) "binds" itself to the serial of your motherboard AND your H.D.D. (I believe, but can't seem to find info to confirm.) Just wondering if Anyone has dealt with this here, thanks. Would really love to just copy everything over and be done with it.

 

[Amaris]

You should be able to clone your image to another HDD, and bootup with that HDD. You might have to reactivate Windows 8, so be ready to make a phone call. Otherwise, you should be fine.

In case you're wondering, I have done this twice for two different people. I used DriveXML to get the job done.

Experience: I'm a PC technician, who has done this for nigh on 15 years.

 

[Tribble puncher]

Cool. Thanks for the Info. was what I wanted to know.

 

[Amaris]

Cool. Thanks for the Info. was what I wanted to know.

Glad I could help.

 

[Magellan]

You should be able to clone your image to another HDD, and bootup with that HDD. You might have to reactivate Windows 8, so be ready to make a phone call. Otherwise, you should be fine.

In case you're wondering, I have done this twice for two different people. I used DriveXML to get the job done.

Experience: I'm a PC technician, who has done this for nigh on 15 years.

Not to hijack a thread but I just used DriveXML to clone my desktop Windows 7 hard drive to another drive. I can view the files on the drive but when I try to boot up from the new one it says no bootable partition found. Do you know what I did wrong?

 

[Amaris]

You should be able to clone your image to another HDD, and bootup with that HDD. You might have to reactivate Windows 8, so be ready to make a phone call. Otherwise, you should be fine.

In case you're wondering, I have done this twice for two different people. I used DriveXML to get the job done.

Experience: I'm a PC technician, who has done this for nigh on 15 years.

Not to hijack a thread but I just used DriveXML to clone my desktop Windows 7 hard drive to another drive. I can view the files on the drive but when I try to boot up from the new one it says no bootable partition found. Do you know what I did wrong?

It can be a number of things.

* Make certain that you partitioned and formatted the new hard drive before restoring the former HDD image to the new hard drive.

If you did that:

* Make certain that the hard drive to which you've made the new image is bootable, and that the drive ID matches the image (if your old drive was "Drive C," make sure the new drive is also "Drive C").

If that fails, use a Windows 7 Repair Disc (easy to make in Windows 7), and repair the Boot MBR.

Then try to reboot and see if it starts up your OS.

 

[JustAFriend]

You can also use programs like Clonezilla that create a bootable recovery CD along with cloning your HD.
You boot off the CD, then stream your clone from a usb drive over to your new HD.