Backup immediately, obviously.
Alan Phipps wrote: ↑Wed, 3. Apr 19, 15:00
The safest way (IMO) to be ready to transfer your system to another boot drive is to use a backup/cloning application to make an image of your boot drive onto backup or removable media or drive.
Seconded. I have NAS for this purpose, where I have one or two images of my drives. That I restore sometimes.
Rug wrote: ↑Wed, 3. Apr 19, 13:50
And if it is dying, then is there a nice simple (and free) way to move Win10 over to the new drive ? I have a Disk for Win 7 , but took the free updgrade to 10 option, so I don't have win 10 media. Is this a problem ?
I had to do this recently myself. I didnt use the images I had, so you may need to do what I did myself below:
I ended up installing my Windows 7 first, since that's what I had a CD for, onto the new / fresh drive. Once I did that, I looked up how to upgrade to Windows 10.
Since you've upgraded once from 7, like me, Microsoft says that they'll keep honoring that. [1]
What you'll do then - is download the installation media and boot the pc with it. This will then proceed updating from Windows 7 to Windows 10. It's possible that maybe you can skip the installing of Windows 7 entirely, and just install 10. Just make sure to enter the key from your old Windows.
check out these
notes for details
the link to the windows 10 installation media is here: (bookmark it)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/softwar ... /windows10
I've ended up making a DVD (4.7GB). If you dont have one, there's an option for the USB drive too.
After that, just follow the prompts.
[1] it becomes a complex question if you change hardware significantly. I've just replaced a drive with another one.