Technostress.. a term I often use when attempting to deal with computer problems. I am far from being an expert on dealing with some of the more technical aspects of a computer, but do tend to be a do-it-yourself type of person versus having someone else do it for me and not understanding what they did. The plus, I might learn something new, the minus – technostress if I don’t know what I am doing! 
Something that most photographers shooting digitally are going to face someday is running out of space on your main system hard drive. If you are storing your images on other external drives, this is often as simple as just buying another one. But as more software comes out for image organization, databases, Photoshop plugins, website tools, etc – this begins taking up space on your main program drive. Less free space may mean your programs begin to run a little slower. Your main program drive may even be divided up into different ‘partitions’ for the sake of keeping some of your data files separate from system and program files. So one single drive may be drive C:, D:, and E:. This is a common suggestion for larger hard drives in the event of a total system crash, only a portion of your data may be affected.
I had thought that migrating this over to a new drive was fairly simple, with very little technostress. Boy was I wrong on that one. I wanted to move from a 80 GB drive with 3 partitions to a 300 GB drive with similar partitions.   But the new drive just didn’t want to play nice and boot with no problems.
So just before I was about to give up on this endeavor, I thought there must be better software out there to handle such things in a more user friendly way for someone who isn’t a computer tech. There aren’t many drive ‘cloning’ programs out there, so I went on a few recommendations for Acronis TrueImage. On the software’s website, it had some verbage specifically about moving to a larger hard drive, so that got my attention! The manual for this software even has an entire chapter dedicated to step by step instructions on doing this very task.
To end a rather long story, this software worked like a charm. It cleaned up all of my tampering with the new drive, transferred all of my partitions, and booted up the first try! I am quite sure there was some user error in configuring the new drive with my older software, but TrueImage took a lot of that opportunity for me to mess it up out of the process with easy-to-understand instructions. Another tool that helped in this situation was an IDE to USB cable. Since I already had 2 hard drives filling the bays of my computer, this enabled me to hook up the new internal drive – externally to a USB port – temporarily until the transfer was complete. This reduced some of the swapping in and out of the computer.
If I have to go through this process again someday, with this software and the IDE to USB cable, it will only take me a fraction of the time I spent on my first time around. I suppose this is all in the learning process, and knowing how the right tools can make all the difference. So I can easily recommend these two tools for anyone wanting to upgrade their hard drive, and take some technostress out of the process..
- Acronis TrueImage – software that takes you through step by step cloning your old drive over to the new one (and also does automated backups – which we all should be doing!)
- IDE to USB cable – a cable that allows you to attach an internal drive, externally, for temporary transfer of data
