m14x clone hdd

While my m14x is in production, I think I may buy a Momentus 500gb hybrid drive to replace the one it comes standard with. I've been looking around on the forum and have found detailed guides and videos on how to replace a hard drive and how to reinstall drivers and such, but couldn't you just clone the original hdd if you didn't want to do a clean install of windows?
If so, how can I go about to do such a thing? Sorry if noob question. Thanks.

 

To be honest .. I want to know this too I also cloned my hdd just in case of a crash .. Hopefully I can use my clone without it messing up the light fx controller :s

 

You need a dock/ sata-usb connector for your new hdd. Then use a software app to clone the hdd, and install. Here are some highly reccomended applications
5 Free Apps to Clone Your Hard Drive

 

You can use Acronis to clone your hard drive. And it allows various ways to do it. You can get a sata to usb connector along with a sata power connector and connect your m14x to your XT and clone from your stock drive, then swap the drives. Or you can copy the image of your stock drive to a external drive, swap out your stock with the XT drive, and plug in the external drive with the cloned image, boot up the acronis repair disc (which has to be made previously, just burn the disc from the software) and clone.

 

Could you use alienrespawn or whatever it is called that people say comes pre-installed on the notebook?

 

When I had my hard drive changed, I did a Windows Complete PC backup to an external drive, made the recovery CD, and then ran it after changing the HDD to restore. Worked perfectly and even brought back the system recovery partition.