Surprisingly (not), Vista swallows hard drive space like a black hole. I realise its trying to be extremely helpful by storing copies of all my files whenever I do something to them in case I'm stupid enough (in case? try because...) to lose or destroy one. So, the 160 gig primary drive in my computer was pretty much gone once I installed Valve's Orange Box. (It sounds rude, but just follow the link)

Now, I had already had a discussion with the other parental unit regarding storage issues in the home network data center (my study). I received what I consider to be complete and utter approval (I don't think she heard me properly and I took that as a sign of agreement) to increase the storage pool. I went to my local computer store and purchased a lovely pair of 500 gig SATA-2 drives for about $260. That's right, a terabyte for $260.

I had a dim memory of Vista having some spectacular hard drive upgrade option where you could just drop the new drive into the machine, then tell Vista to put the primary partition and everything on the old drive onto it with one mouse click. I was close. Close like the sun of a distant star system is close to my driveway.

What you have to do (and I'm putting this out there for any other poor sucker who tries, as I couldn't find any real meaty info on it) is considerably more involved than that.

What you're looking for is a Vista feature called Windows Complete PC Backup. This is essentially a disk imaging tool. What you can do with it is take a snapshot of your entire system (or a specific drive in it's entirety) and store it on a bunch of DVDs or some other removable storage - like another hard drive.

So, I whacked one of the new 500's into the machine and performed a complete backup of my system drive onto it. It took about, I dunno, 15 minutes or so to dump about 150 gig. Not too shabby.

The next step sounded easy. Put the new system drive in, boot from the Vista DVD, choose repair instead of install, pick the backup to restore from and away you go.

The problem is, the drive needs to be formatted first! It doesn't mention this anywhere in any of the documentation and of course, when you don't have a bootable system it's a bit hard to format a drive.

What I did was to start an install, and get as far as setting up the partitions and formatting the drive, then I restarted and reran the repair steps and it all worked. How hard would it have been to add the ability to restore onto a fresh drive, seeing as the restore repartitions and reformats the thing anyway?

I suppose the result of it all is, with a little bit of mucking around, I was able to move my primary drive onto a much bigger one without having to purchase any imaging software, and I haven't had to reactivate Vista. Aside from the two or so hours mucking around in the middle swapping drives around trying to get Vista's installer to recognise the new drive, the whole process should've taken about a half an hour. Pretty good, really*.

 

 

 

[*] I know it started out as a whinge, but overall I was impressed. If they had've tested this a bit more and tried what I would consider to be the defacto test case for this feature, I reckon it would've been awesome.