BIOS -- got it. Thanks.
>No more jumpers, but you have to select the new drive as a boot device in the BIOS. And you must set the old HD as not bootable.
>
>>Sounds like a good approach. I have not been inside this PC before and need to make sure it has a spare drive bay.
>>
>>The last time I added a hard drive I had to play around with jumper switches to let the machine know which drive was primary and which was secondary. Is that still the way it works?
>>
>>>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? ---
>>>>
>>>>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.
>>>>
>>>>Any gotchas I should be aware of or am overlooking?
>>>>
>>>>Also, if I do buy a new hard drive, any recommendations of sellers?
>>>>
>>>>Thanks!
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