Custom built system on which I now have Vista Home Premium loaded.'
I bought the Windows 7 Ultimate upgrade and would like to load it into this system.
One of the installed 3 hard drives is making a weird noise on startup, not sure which 1 it is.
I plan to replace all 3 and install a 4th. drive
How do I go about saving all programs and data on the 3 existing drives, change them out, them re-load the previously saved data on to the new drives?
After that is completed I plan to load 7 into the system
I do have access to several sizeable (500 gB) external drives
Can anyone walk me thru an easy procedure for this?

Thanks in advance !

The method depends on your ideal outcome and what you're attempting to preserve. If you just want to backup the media files from all of the drives, then manual drag and drop should suffice, assuming that the drive's contents are not exclusively those file types. If you are interested in the entire contents of each drive, you can either use an image creation program like Norton Ghost that would allow you to copy the contents of those drives exactly and save them to whatever location you like to be restored later.


One final thought, depending on the slots available in your rig you could always connect one of the new sata drives, copy the contents over manually then rinse and repeat for the remaining drives. Manual backup has the benefit of being free, but norton ghost is 70 bucks well spent if you are working with multiple drives and lots of info.