transfering vista to new hard drive

[benzy]

this might be a real basic question and maybe i'm lazy for not google-ing it but i have a new hard drive on the way to replace a 160 sata 300 which had windows vista pre installed on to it and i didnt have a disc with the software.

so how do i go about putting vista on my new hard drive is it a case of buying a new vista software in which case i'll go but windows 7 or can i active something to tell mircosoft i had a lagit version that i need crossing over to my new hard drive.

ta,

 

[MavAV]

The easiest way to do it is to connect the new hard drive to your PC whilst keeping the old one in place and use disk copying software to transfer the data to your new drive. Once this is complete you remove the old hard drive, put in the new one and reboot.

You can either purchase disk copying software (I use EASUS Partition Master), or a lot of the hard drive manufacturers, for example Western Digital, supply the software free.

 

[MarkE19]

Just go to the support site for the make of your new HDD and see if they have free HDD clone software to download - many do offer this.
Otherwise if you want to buy some software that you can continue to use for backing up your PC have a look at the likes of Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image. I use Ghost at home and at work for backups & restores and find it very reliable and easy to use. Have a look at Radified Guide to Norton Ghost for help on using Ghost (also helps with Acronis etc) to clone and backup a HDD.

Mark.