m6400 2 ?s: Upgrading HDDs/RAID and recent BSOD w/Vista Ultimate x64 update

1. I have 2 160GB 7200RPM hard drives in RAID 1 in my laptop, it's what it came with. A while ago, I bought 2 500GB 7200RPM HDDs to put in it. I would like to take off RAID and replace my hdds w/the new ones and easily get all my stuff on my new hdds w/o having to reinstall/etc (I assume this means I would need to image my drive or something). What would be the best procedure to do this?

I was also thinking of changing to Windows 7 or at least double booting or something (although i've never set that up before)...

2. I have Vista Ultimate x64. Yesterday, it was bugging me to update so I did and then restarted. It wouldn't boot back up. It got to the Dell screen then BSODed then restarted again and did Startup Repair. I had to agree to have it do a system restore. Luckily, I was able to get through fine after that and nothing was damaged, as far as I can tell.

The updates it says are important that I still need to do are:

• Update for Microsoft Silverlight (KB970363)
• Cumulative Security Update for IE8 for Vista x64 systems (KB972260)
• Security Update for Visual C++ 2005 Service Pack 1 (KN973923)
• Security Update for Visual C++ 2008 (KB973924)

Did anyone else have this issue? I re-backed up my computer using the Vista backup tool as soon as I was able to get back into windows but now I'm wary of updating again.

 

If you no longer want to RAID your drives, you can take a single 250GB drive, hook it up to your machine via your choice of USB-SATA adapter, and use an imaging program like Acronis to clone your RAID image to the single drive. Then, install the drive and you should be good to go.

If you want to dual-boot, you can leave some space on the first drive while you're imaging it for the Windows 7 partition, or simply use up the entirety of the second drive, depending on how much space you want in each partition.

As for the updates, you can try installing each update individually and see which one crashes the machine. If it's a single update, just skip it; it'll probably be fine.