A program/software to copy a hard drive?

I am going to get a laptop sooner or later, but I have a pretty good
hdd with me that is not in use. I would like to replace the hdd in the laptop
with the one that I have. But is there a way to complety copy the stuff
in the laptop hdd into the hdd that I am going to use? I mean including
the vista and all the programs.

Thanks

 

i don't think you can copy an install of vista. May have some issues with the registry.

if anyone knows of a program that can do this i am interested as well.

 

I think he means, when he gets a cheap laptop with Vista installed, he wants to transfer that to the really nice harddrive he has, then that one goes into the laptop and the original goes on the shelf.

The process is called cloning or imaging and there are many programs that will do this. The trick is the method.

I use a second computer to speed the process...remove the original laptop drive, clone it to an image and then take the image and put it on the new drive (or directly if you have the hardware).

Depending on the software, you may then need to expand the partition since the clone makes an exact duplicate--so, for example, if your original drive is 100gb, and you make an image, then put the image on a 320gb drive, you will have a 100gb partition on the 320gb drive with 220gb un-used.

Then you resize the partition to fill the entire drive.

This can be accomplished with commercial products like Acronis True Image and Partition Magic, or free products.

Be careful with Cloning and partitioning resizing with VISTA, though, as it uses a slightly different version of NTFS that older programs may screw up (partition magic will not always resize a vista partition properly--though Vista can resize a partition to use unusued space natively

 

thats cool, i had no idea about that

 

thanks for the info... Is there a particular program, whether it's free or not,
that you would recommend to use for vista cloning that is user friendly?

 

It depends on how you are going to do it.

In my case, I have a desktop tower with 3.5 and 2.5 connections so I can do this with laptops and desktops

(you can get a 2.5 usb harddrive adapter or 3.5 to 2.5 adapter for $20)

Acronis true image has a free 15 day trial, and this is very simple to use. Purchase price is anywhere from $25 on sale to $40. It is by far the easiest to use, but there are others that are not too hard. Acronis is cool because you can actually image the OS you are using, so you can -- for example-- create an image of the current OS to a network share without the trouble of another computer. You can then create a boot CD with network drivers to actually grab the image and put it back on the newly inserted blank drive.

That is if your network card is supported.

Here are several freeware programs that I have used in the past:

http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/backupandimage.shtml

You will also see some free partition resizing programs on that site