Replacing and Cloning a HDD

Hello everyone, just looking to make an upgrade to my laptop (Sager NP8690) and wanted a bit of advice, and I thought this would be the best forum.

I'm going to upgrade my HDD to the Seagate momentus XT 500gb, or the Western digital Scorpio Black 7200rpm 750gb from the 320gb HDD that came with my laptop. I didn't opt for a second hard drive in this laptop as I knew I would be using the CD drive a lot, so I am confused on how to best clone my current HDD. I have an external for back ups, would it be best to make a system image with a program like clonezilla on the back up, pop the old one out, put the new one in, boot from the external and copy to the new drive? Or is there a more simple method I am not aware of? I have done my fair share of Google-fu, but not gotten one answer that really makes sense =/

Thank you so much in advance.
Edgar.

 

I always use acronis true image to do such jobs. the WD edition is free to use if the HDD you switch to/from is WD. (in fact I've used it on non-WD HDD clonings. not sure if that breaks some license agreement or not but functionality-wise it works perfectly)

you need to put your new HDD in an external encloure or the 2nd HDD bay/Optical HDD caddy to do the cloning using this software.

 

This laptop could have shipped with a second hardrive in the optical drive, does mean I can quite easily remove it and place the second hardrive in? Or would an external caddy be worth the ~30 bucks?

 

if you didn't order it that way - with a second HDD in the optical drive - then you most likely would need either an optical bay HDD caddy or an external HDD enclosure.

 

Thank you very much for your help =)

 

2.5" SATA HDDs use the same power/data connectors as desktop drives, meaning if you have access to a desktop system you can use it for the cloning. Just make sure you don't accidentally boot from the drives because the different hardware can confuse Windows.