Copy Hard Drive

Is there a way to copy a laptop hardrive to another laptop hardrive with no external enclosure or anything? Is it possible to copy over a network or anything of the sort?

 

What I found that works best (for backup of system out of box) is using Ghost to image the drive to DVD. I have tested the following on my Dell XPS M1710 and also on a old Compaq D315 desktop I had laying around. As for your question about copying it to another HDD - not sure. Below info is a good first place to start.

Check it out -

1. Review the .pdf file http://images.lunarpages.com/pdf/Dell%20Notebook%20Restore%20Utility%20Guide.pdf
2. Download the boot CD image http://images.lunarpages.com/bootCD.zip

 

Tricky. Why don't you just exchange the disks? Or if you can't do it, try Ghost or some other image tool as batboy said. There was one free tool for partition copying called DriveImage XML. It did the job right when I used it.

I hope this helps,

Ivan

 

The problem with that is I don't have any way to copy the image such as a dvd drive. I cant exchange the discs because i need one to be directly writen to the other, or at least stored an image stored in a remote location and then recopied onto the new hd.

 

Easiest I have found is a the new (future boot drive) hard drive mounted in an external USB enclosure. Then install Casper (from Future Systems Solutions;
http://www.fssdev.com/) then clone your existing drive. Swap em out, off you go!

 

I guess you can form a network with a
1) Ethernet crossover cable (using LAN jacks jacks)
2) (I think: see this) IEEE 1394 (FireWire) cable (using FireWire jacks)
3) USB Data Link cable (using USB jacks)
4) last resort: serial/parallel direct cable link (but very x 100 slow)