• Installation Assistance page
• How to determine which cabling to use.
• How to install and troubleshoot ATA hard drives
• Interactive ATA installation guide
• Interactive Serial ATA installation guide
• Seagate SATA installation tutorial
• How to install and troubleshoot Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives
• SATA-II installation interactive flash guide
• How to install, format, and partition an internal PATA or SATA drive in Windows Vista
• How to install and troubleshoot Seagate SCSI hard drives

How do I copy everything from my old desktop drive to my new desktop drive?

Please follow these steps for getting your drive ready to use. Skip any that are not applicable to your situation.

1. You must install Windows or MacOS (the operating system). Either use the link above to perform a copy from your old drive to your new one, or insert your Windows or Mac installation CD/DVD, reboot, and follow the installation instructions that will appear.



2. Once the operating system is installed, you will need to install any programs that you want to use, such as productivity suites, graphics software, or games.



3. Now you can create and save content on your new drive! Documents, spreadsheets, videos, pictures - you may move them from other storage media, like CDs, flash drives, external drives, or the Internet.
   How to move data around from folder to folder, or from one storage media to a hard drive in Windows.
   How to move data around from folder to folder, or from one storage media to a hard drive in MacOS.



4. The only software programs that Seagate has designed to work with desktop drives are:
   
   
   • Seatools for Windows - For testing drives and determining whether a drive needs to be replaced.
   • Seatools for DOS - For testing drives like Seatools for Windows
     For limiting and resetting the capacity to maximum (if necessary).
     For erasing a drive to start over again.
   • DiscWizard and MaxBlast - For copying (cloning, imaging) the entirety of one drive or one partition to another

Desktop computers often have just one hard drive - the boot drive. The only safe way to change the partitions on a boot drive is to reinstall Windows or MacOS, which can be time-consuming and difficult.

However, your desktop computer might have a second hard drive, or you might obtain one.

• How to partition a drive in Windows Vista.
• How to partition a drive in Windows XP/2000.
• How to partition a drive in MacOS X.

If you have only the boot drive, here are 3 methods for organizing the data in your drive:

• Create easy-to-manage folders and drag and drop and/or copy and paste your data into them.
• Use an external or second internal desktop hard drive to increase your storage space. Or, if you have an extra drive lying around, get a usually-inexpensive external USB or FireWire enclosure (not sold by Seagate), install the hard drive inside it, and then use the drive as an external drive. You can partition that drive all you like. (Remember, the partitioning process is data-destructive to the drive being partitioned so be sure you don't have any important data on it before doing this.)
• Reinstall Windows or MacOS, and partition the drive during that process. This process is data-destructive.