Remove windows Installation from Old WD hard drive and Install Fresh Copy on the New One.

Question

Hi Community! I just bought a new WD Blue 1 TB hard drive, my old hard drive is WD Blue caviar 500 GB, running on Windows 7 ultimate 32 bit.
There are two things I wish to do: 1. Firstly, if it's possible, I would like to copy some videos, images, music etc. from my OLD Drive to the new one.
Please note that, I don't have an external disk to do it, I know that would've been less complicated, but that's not an option at this point. 2. Secondly, once that is done, if possible, I want to remove windows 7 installation from my old hard drive, re-partition it to make it just the storage drive, and finally install
fresh copy of windows 7- 64 bit to the new Hard drive.
Please note that, my old Hard drive is installed on windows 7- 32 bit and now I want to install a fresh copy of Windows 7-64bit instead of 32bit, because I am upgrading my
configuration with better ones.
I am adding 4 GB corsair vengeance ram to my 2 GB corsair ram, so that is 6 GB in total.
I am adding 1 TB hard disk to my 500 GB Hard disk, so that is 1500 GB.
Both my processor and mother board supports 64 bit.
Intel® Pentium® Processor G2020 (3M Cache, 2.90 GHz) And this Mother board - "Biostar H61MGV3"I know that you could clone the partition and migrate the installation from one hard drive to another using the Acronis True Image WD Edition Software, but I don't want that.
In simple words, say I have a dos computer, I installed my 1TB WD hard drive, installed a fresh copy of windows 7-64bit. So my computer is up and running. Now, I have another hard
drive which I wish to use, that is 500GB WD, but it has Windows 7-32 bit installed in it.
So what I want to do is, make this old hard drive a complete 500 gb storage device and remove the windows installation from it, without loosing music, videos, etc. and then lastly
copying the music and other media to the new hard drive, and formatting it completely.
I am perhaps making this very complicated, I know you would have better easier solution for this.
I am frustrated, your help would be appreciated, thanks a lot. Sincerely, Abe

Answer 1

Since you don't want to clone the drive (I agree with you), you can just swap drives and install Windows on the new drive. Windows won't complain that you are installing on a different drive because it only cares if you change more than one piece of hardware at a time. The problem will arise when you copy the files from the old drive because you cannot just connect it via SATA. That would confuse Windows, as both installations were run on that hardware. You need to mount it in an external dock via USB 2.0/3.0 which will isolate the details of the OS. After you copy all necessary files, you can use WDC Lifeguard to write zeros to the entire disk and then create a new partition. After that you can mount it via SATA because it will be a new drive. Do NOT be in a hurry to wipe the drive however, as you don't want to forget something.