Recently I was about to move my system and files to a larger hard drive, and was planning on doing it the same old way. You know the drill: Install the new drive as a slave, then install Windows and begin basic housekeeping and preparation. The swap file Windows uses to provide virtual memory must then be manually moved to the new hard drive-otherwise, attempts to copy will abort. This requires that you use first use Fdisk and format the new drive so that Windows will recognize it; otherwise, you can't copy anything to it. If all goes well, you can drag and drop the C: drive to whatever the new drive calls itself.

Now, there's a better way. Higher Ground Software offers a fast, easy, three-step process for cloning your hard drive. It's called Drive2Drive (D2D) and it uses larger-than-DOS memory along with Windows copy conventions in a way DOS-based programs cannot. D2D is a true cloning program that doesn't use an image file to recreate your old disk, and it works without all the tedious preparation.

D2D is Windows Me-compatible, and is compatible with drives different in size from your old one. All you have to do is install the new hard disk as a master or slave using a second IDE ribbon cable...

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