Jolt Country

The 40GB hard drive in my laptop is getting too small. Increasing amounts of music, games, and Photoshop projects have cut my free space down to approximately 650MB. I have been looking at bigger hard drives on NewEgg, and it looks like I can get an 80GB drive for about $70.

The thing is, I really don't want to hassle with backing up and reinstalling everything. I want to know if there's some way I can get an external laptop HD enclosure that connects by USB or something, so I can copy the entire contents of the old drive to the new one, install the new one in place of the old one, and be on my merry way.

Is this possible, and are there any potential problems with this plan? Thanks in advance.

Are you on XP for the laptop? You'll definitely want to install fresh on the new drive. Copying the operating system over doesn't work very well... ah, you know what, maybe you can do it easier these days thanks to utilities like Ghost and such, that make images of drives.

So essentially you want an external enclosure for your laptop drive, right? I found this link that I think describes what you are looking for: http://dotavery.com/blog/archive/2004/03/12/855.aspx

Does that help, bud?

Get an external enclosure and a copy of Ghost. If you don't want to spend money, get a copy of Ghost for Unix, an independent implementation of the same idea; google "g4u" to find it. That will let you do a bit-by-bit copy of the old drive to the new one, so that you don't have to hassle with reinstalling.

(Obligatory OS flame: Or, you know, you could look into running a real operating system like Linux or OS X that is actually designed properly to allow this sort of thing)

--Matt