With more and more data and video, our drives are quickly running out of space. Fortunately, you can always find a bigger drive.
It’s also good practice to replace your laptop drive every 2-3 years before it suddenly fails you.
The problem arises when you want to copy your data from your old drive to the new one, especially if you have special partitions on your drive (Lenovo and HP recovery partitions, etc.).
I had to replace my drive a couple of days back and found the following programs very useful:
– CloneZilla: Needs basic tech knowledge to create a bootable CD. Has a lot of advanced options but you can stick to the defaults which worked perfectly fine for me (Lenovo T420)
– AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition : CloneZilla will create a clone of your disk drive leaving additional space unallocated. Windows 7 disk manager is only capable of merging two consecutive partitions. If you have more than two partitions, AOMEI Partition Assistant will do the trick for you.
Both programs are free.