Cloning Operating System from Old Hard Drive

[mleclere]

I just purchased the Hitachi 7K320 hard drive to upgrade the 100 gb drive of my Thinkpad T60-P. What is the best way to clone the drive so that I can keep all of the operating system and files and just transfer to the new drive?

I know that I need a software such as Ghost but am not sure whether I can use an external hard drive as a temporary drive to park the image while I install the new hard drive, or whether a different system is required?

Help Please. Also, what is the best software to buy?

[runbuh]

Search around this site for "clone enclosure". You can hook your new drive up to an USB external enclosure (or USB-to-SATA cable is what I use) and clone it over.

The last time I cloned, I used the True Image 11 software doing the same upgrade you did. My new drive was plugged in to the USB port. The clone did not work when resizing the partition - the drive would not boot, but the data was there. If I cloned the partition over at the same 100GB size, the new drive worked great. I ended up cloning over at the same size and using a Knoppix boot CD (read: open source) to resize the partition. Google "Knoppix partition resize" for lots of nice articles.

It seems to me that there ought to be an easier way. If someone has cloned from a 100GB to a 320GB partition using an external USB enclosure, and had it work, please post a reply and let us know exactly what enclosure and cloning software you used, and how you used it (new drive internal, new drive external, what?).