My main desktop PC (a Precision Workstation 390) has a 120gb Hard Disk and I was reaching the upper limit of storage.

The Precision 390 can easily house a couple of Hard Disk’s in it’s bays. So I purchased a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB S300. The S300 bit stands for SATA 3.0. The Precision 390 has handle this.

So now I have the problem of one big hard disk 500gb and one smaller 120mb and Ideally I want to swap the roles of these around. The new 500gb is a faster drive than the existing Maxstor 120gb and I want the option of removing the 120gb drive for spares in the future.

Now Seagate offer a free tool on their website called Maxtor MaxBlast.

This is a Hard Disk Cloning tool. This allows you to create an exact mirror of your existing drive on a new drive. It’s a 100% copy so all your software, data and settings are moved.

So how do you do it.

1) Plug the the new Hard disk in the PC

2) Download Maxtor MaxBlast.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=MaxBlast_5&vgnextoid=7add8b9c4a8ff010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

MaxBlast PDF Link:Learn more

3) Install MaxBlast

4) Go through a wizard that prepares the new drive.

5) Then Clone Disk that starts the operation of cloning one disk to another. This wizard took about 40 minuets.

6) Once completed I disabled the original hard disk in the bios and the PC booted from the new 500gb drive.

All in all a very easy process to follow. It appears MaxBlast will work as long as one of your drives is a Maxstor. If not you would have to use something like Symantec’s Ghost to perform a similar task.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 8:04 am and is filed under Blog Entries, Tech Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.