The Laptop Hard Drive Upgrade Quest

[Atrophius]

Okay, I need help from those of you who may be more familiar with how Vista reacts to these type of hardware changes. I want to upgrade my tiny little laptop hard drive because I'm pitifully low on disk space.

So, I'm looking at upgrading to this drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136314). I also want to completely image my current hard drive onto the new one, so I'm looking to do that using this docking station (http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=3301908&tab=summary).

Fine people of Anfiniti, can you tell me how much Vista is going to piss itself over this hardware change? Will this require a repair install of the OS or should I be safe just imaging the drive from a full system backup or other tool made for that purpose?

[Mindlessmaniac]

Unfortunately, I'm not to familiar with this, but I can try to offer some insight. It might be ok in light of the fact that Vista can dynamically shrink volumes. Driver wise, you might be ok since Vista apparently has far better SATA support than XP did (aka almost none built in). I also found this blog entry (http://tonesdotnetblog.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/upgrade-your-notebook-hard-drive-on-windows-vista-using-a-usb-drive/) which might prove useful to you. Sounds like Vista will handle rather nicely, which is a surprise. Good luck and let us know how it goes.

Just found a couple more interesting links:

http://geekswithblogs.net/lorint/archive/2006/12/07/100596.aspx

and

http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:RYVTgtr9smkJ:ask.metafilter.com/57345/How-to-upgrade-to-a-larger-hard-drive-in-Windows-Vista+upgrade+to+a+larger+hard+drive+in+WIndows+Vi sta&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a

[Atrophius]

I've been meaning to upgrade to Vista Ultimate, anyway. This'll be a good time to do so. I guess I'll go pick up a copy of Vista when I order the new drive.