How do I go about doing this safely?

I bought a new HD for my laptop to increase it's size along with an external enclosure for my old one.

Now I want to know the best and cheapest way to clone my current Vista drive onto the new one. I was planning on hooking the new one up via the external enclosure and somehow cloning the Vista drive over to the new one. Then just put the new drive into my machine hoping that everything will work the way it used to.

Does Vista have it's own program that will do this for me, or do I have to go through a 3rd party program.

 

Try acronis true image, or norton ghost.

Basically you make an image of ur current drive and then you store in on that drive. Then you put that drive into the external enclosure while the new drive goes into ur notebook. Then you load the image from the external drive onto the new internal.

 

Ok, I just did a Perfect clean install of XPP on my laptop. Is there anyway I can copy the whole system and put it on an 8GB flash drive for backup incase I want to start over anytime.

Do I use Acronis?

I know it's trialware so are there any limitations or is it just the time limit?

Also, once I import the image to the flash drive and I store that away for let's say a few months. Then my OS has a bunch of crap on it. Do I just move the whole image that I put on my flash drive into the HDD of my laptop then double click on the image? Will I need Acronis installed in order to run that image?

And if it does transform my used HDD into that image, does it clean and erase everything and put it back to the state to when I performed a clean install?

 

Will the laptop automatically pick up the vista installation on the USB drive, or will I have to set that in BIOS?

 

When you restore a drive image, the drive is restored to be exactly as when you made the image. So if you do a clean install in December, then make an image, then use your laptop until April. In April you restore the image you made to the hard drive, it will come back just like the one you made in December. That will also wipe out any of the data you made between December and April, unless you back it up first or store it on a different drive.

 

And I can install it on any kind of HDD? Even if it's a different computer?

And how would I restore? Is it like recovery discs, like you have to boot into it?

 

You'll need to restore it on the same computer, but if you put in a new hard disk, you can install onto that new hard disk. Vista activation is locked to the hardware, so you can't just install the image anywhere you like.

Restoration is usually done using a boot disk that comes as part of the software when you buy it.

 

Wait....a boot disk when I buy it? But it's trialware. I have to buy acronis to use it?

 

Way for my post to be hijacked!

But anyways, I completed my task. I think I went about it the hard way though. I cloned the drive with Acronis instead of using the backup method, then I just fiddled with the 2 partitions I had and put them to sizes I deemed acceptable.

Long story short, put the new cloned drive into my laptop, it started up perfectly no problems, everything is there and so far works.

 

Yeah, sometimes that happens. But glad it worked out for you.

 

Well it sounds like the other guy needs more help, so I'll let him have this one.