Can i do a factory restore on a new, blank hard drive?

Question

i have an old 80gb hard drive that's almost full, and i want to do a factory restore on a new 500gb hard drive... can i do this and just transfer the files from the old drive to the new one after the restore?

Answer 1

i don't know what you mean by factory restore, never heard of that on hard drives, but yea you can transfer all the data bit-for-bit, there are a few free utilities that can do it

Answer 2

Only if you have the original disk

You would be better of fitting in the 500gb as a slave drive that way you do not need to do any installing and can copy files from 80gb to the new one

I would also advise partitioning the 500gb into about 4 partitions and name them EG music  Games personal video etc