What I usually do, is to mount a new hard drive, and install everything from scratch on this HD. I keep my old HD as D:, which means that I am easily able to restore important files from it later.

>My main home computer has accumulated enough junk that it has become a little iffy, even after a recent upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate. Installs and uninstalls are particularly dicey. Also, the hard drive is only 160 GB and down to about 30 GB free. I am considering two alternatives. One is to migrate everything to what has been a spare computer used only for developmentm making the current main computer the spare. The other is to buy a bigger hard drive and start fresh on that. The purpose of this post is to do a sanity check on the plan if I take door number two. Am I missing anything here? ---
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>1. Back up everything from the current HD to an external USB hard drive. This is already happening. The USB drive has backups from Norton Ghost and a daily automated backup by Backup4All. For good measure, I use Carbonite to keep everything backed up on the internet.
>2. Test that I have a bootable DVD disc. I think the Ghost install/recovery disc will do.
>3. Replace the hard drive.
>4. Reinstall Windows 7 clean.
>5. Reinstall applications.
>6. Restore data files from the external HD.
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>Any gotchas I should be aware of or am overlooking?
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>Also, if I do buy a new hard drive, any recommendations of sellers?
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>Thanks!