Im thinking about getting a new hard drive for my laptop (Insuffecient memory). I know which one i want. But im wondering if i would have to re-install Windows on the new hard drive or not.

No, not if you have a way to transfer data from one HDD to the other. It depends on which connections your laptop has what the best and cheapest solution would be. But basically, you connect to your new hard drive in an external fashion, and duplicate the image of your current hard drive to the new one. If all you have is USB, it will take a long time, but it's entirely possible.

Yes the new hard drive will come with nothing on it. As said you can make an image of the current drive with something such as Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image, though they are paid software. NewEgg had a deal recently on Ghost but if you want somethign free you could try DriveImage XML though I have never used it personally. Then you would just need to expand the volume size to fill the remaining space with the new drive.

I'm pretty out of the loop when it comes to laptops, but I think most of the components inside one are proprietary. I think you'll have to go through the manufacturer to get a replacement. I might be wrong about newer laptops, but at least that is the way it used to be.

As far as transferring the data from one drive to another, iGuess is right. It's not that hard to do, just time consuming...

99.99999999% of the time, you can just go get a 2.5'' hdd and put it in there. Though sometimes it isn't easy to actually get to the hard drive, it's almost always possible


Cloning from one drive to another (which is what iGuess was talking about) is hella lot faster than any other method of getting Windows and all your files onto a new hard drive.


Or use CloneZilla (which is completely free in every sense) which does direct imaging from drive to drive as well as expanding partition tables to fit larger drives.