well, I finally decided to buy a new hard drive.
Got a 120gb off eBay to replace my 30gb.

How do I do this?
On my piece of shit Dell, I cannot have 2 hard drives.

remove the 30gb and insert the 120gb??? there is nothing to it really. Just make sure it's on Master or whatever the current hard drive is set to.

do you plan on reinstalling your operating system, or are you going to clone your data on to the new drive first? of you just want the extra space, you could always just put it in an external enclosure

I just want to copy everything from my old drive & put it on my new one.

If there's absolutely no way to unplug your CD drive to use the power and data ribbon on the new hard drive to transfer data, you'll need to borrow someone else's computer to transfer, or else buy a hard drive enclosure.

A very annoying thing I keep running into at work is that it's pretty hard to transfer an installed Windows system from one hard drive to another. Sometimes you can get away with a bit-for-bit copy (not too easy for you), but it might not work.

This is probably worth paying someone to do right. Most of the free solutions I know of require access to the old and new disk, and also a CD drive to boot from. The only exceptions are bootable floppies with command-line interfaces (Not recommended for dabbling!).

I'm assuming you're using Windows (XP or Vista), I suggest Ghost or Acronis. Good luck, strongly consider spending some money to get this done right.

What model of Dell? You probably can have two hard drives, but you might have to sacrifice your floppy if there is no room left in the case.

Eh. I'm just going to build a whole computer & install Vista.

Posted by Washu What model of Dell? You probably can have two hard drives, but you might have to sacrifice your floppy if there is no room left in the case.

My last computer was a Dell and that's what I had to do. Remove the floppy drive to make space for the second hard drive. It was actually quite easy to do.