Can I transfer EVERYTHING to my new hard drive?

Question

I am having problems with my old, small, primary hard drive.
I want to replace it.
I have a new, external, USB hard drive that I use for data storage.

Can I copy ALL files, including OS, Word and Excel, to my new hard drive so that:
1. I can boot from bios (telling bios to boot from USB devide)
2. Still operate windows, word, excel from the external USB drive????

Excel and Word were installed with my old machine.
I only use this old machine for Excel and Word.

Answer 1

no you cant, you can copy data but not programs. Programs and Windows require registry entries and this is done when it is installed from a CD or file, the boot sector is unlikely to run Windows without modification to the Boot.ini file. You will need to be sure that the external drive letter always remains the same and often in the same USB port or it may fail to boot.

To run from an external drive does work but it still needs to have entries loaded into the registry first to specify where it has to boot from.

Your best option is to back up your data to the external drive, install your new drive (with an Operating System) then reload the Office parts you need and either keep the data on the external or more sensibly keep it on both the new drive and the external as a back up.

If you have lost your Windows or Office CD key then download and run this to find them

KeyFinder - http://www.magicaljellybean.com/keyfinder/

a brilliant piece of software less than 1Mb in size!

Answer 2

Quick answer is no. It's a bit more complicated then just copying files over. Your OS has multiple pointers on the hard drive so that it knows to run Windows or whatever OS you are running. So it will not work. However, I suggest you copy over all important docs to the external then if you have recovery disks or partition use that and reinstall windows. I'm not sure how old your computer is or what windows OS it is running. If it's a laptop or a PC all things I do not know. I suggest you just reformat that primary drive. Yeah it's small but if you just save everything to that external it wont fill up.





::Sara is right in some way you will need to reinstall software you have installed such that are part of the Microsoft Office suite. This is because Microsoft puts all kind of files and stuff around in reg and stuff making it hard to just copy and put it on another PC. Simple enough if you have the keys.



::The other person says you can't load a OS on an external. I debate that saying you can and why couldn't you. It's HDD space just like everything else. If you format it and install a copy of windows on it, it will work fine. People do it all the time. Understand however you can't go plugging it in any computer and booting up as windows detects major hardware changes and will ask you to re-validate. I do agree that it may be really slow though however if the external HDD hooks up via external Sata then it will be fine. USB 3.0 it might be fine USB 2.0 might be slow.

Answer 3

you cant install an operating system like windows onto an external drive, and you cant copy over the programs and OS onto the external drive, and you cant run the programs or OS off of it, even if you could it would probably take 30minutes to start up and would be incredibly slow.