need asap cloning help!

hellow everyone...

i'm upgrading my hard drive, my current machine has windows xp installed. i use this machine for work so its filled with work related program. now it will be pain to freshly install windows and install each piece of software by itself and each driver for all of my devices on its own. so i'm wondering whats the easiest and quickets way to clone the hard drive?

i've already hooked the new hard drive to a usb thingy so now i can hook it up to my machine. keep in mind that the new harddrive is smaller than the old one. but the old one has huge amount of free space so there is no need to match the size. will i still be able to clone the drive?

will i have to reactivate all of my programs?

and finally, will i be able to boot from the usb drive?

thanks a lot in advance

 

Its unlikely that you'll will have to re-activate any programs, since all registry keys and entries will remain intact.

If BIOS supports booting through USB, then yes. (Check it in the BIOS's boot order menu)

Check out this and this post.

 

You won't have to do any reactivation of programs after cloning an HD. Acronis TrueImage or Norton Ghost are both good commercial cloning programs.

 

wrong... windows cannot boot off external media, for the main reason that usb drivers are not loaded quick enough during start up. you have to physically replace your old hd with your new one in order to boot from it.

 

OK guys, thank you so much. replies are very much helpful.

But there is still one question wasn't answered... do both hard drives have to be identical in space? or is it okay if the hdd i want to clone is a little bit larger but the extra space is actually empty? I read one of the links that Casper can do it. but will other softwares do it normally?

Another new question, is it possible to clone my desktop on a laptop HDD drive and then boot from the desktop?

thanks again