Windows 10: Need to buy a bigger Hard Drive. Can I "copy" the entire system to it and use this old one...

I've been runing out of space for ages, I have 3 external Hard Drives, but now it's really time to get a new Main Hard Drive. I'm afraid to have to install everything again in the new one, including Windows, Visual Studio, SQL Server, all my dev/analyst tools, all my games and apps, all the drives... That would really be close to impossible. Is there a way to tell Windows "hey, get out of that HD, you live over there now, you and all your little friends, vacate the old HD and move into the fancier bigger one" and then Windows will just go "ok, sure!" and I won't have to reinstall a single thing?

Or maybe I just reinstall Windows in the new HD and the rest is taken care for me? Because I think Windows may need repairs. I get a black screen sometimes (sound continues playing for a while, for example if I were watching a film, but input gets locked out and the screen goes black.... anyway, this is not the question I'm here to ask... I just want to know the easiest possible way of moving my entire system from 1 HD to another.

:)

 

Replacing old hard drive, need way to copy Windows installation across

Hey Guys,
What would be the best way of copying/imaging the entire contents of an old system drive over to a replacement hard disk for the same machine? I need to copy the Windows installations and all other data to the new drive, and then format the old drive to use as a backup.

Any suggestions? *Smile

 

new system old hard drive...

I have an old hard drive that has those old ribbon connections to transfer data to the mother board.

I have a new computer that mostly uses those cool little ATA (I think that is what they are called) connections.

The new computer has a Vista OS.

I opened up the case and I was supprised to see on the motherboard a wide ribbon connection and so I connected the old hard drive and a free power connection.

When I turned on the computer, the system started up like usual and did not notice the new hard drive.

I went to the Control Pannel and did an automatic add hard drive call and it did not find the old hard drive.

Any suggestions?

 

Copy entire drive?

I need to copy the contents of an entire drive over to another one. Cloning applications aren't working for me because the source drive is larger than the destination drive (the amount of data actually present will fit on the destination drive no problem, however).

I've tried xcopy and robocopy, but xcopy fails evidently because some file names are too long, and robocopy fails because it can't copy some protected system files.