Thinkpads Forum

After reading through this forum, I bought a Seagate Momentus 7200.3 ST9320421AS 320GB 7200 RPM, and a Rosewill RX81U-ES-25A 2.5" SATA to USB 2.0 External Enclosure from New Egg. Total cost was $118.

The enclosure was very to set up.

Because I wanted to do a drive to drive cloning operation (not just imaging), and I didn't want to pay for a commercial product, I used Clonezilla (http://clonezilla.org/). It is a little cryptic, but I used the defaults, and it was very fast.

When I put the drive back into my machine, it would not boot (I was expecting this) because of MBR issues. I repaired my MBR by booting with UBCD4WIN (http://www.ubcd4win.com/), which has a great tool on it called FixMBR which walks through the process (all freeware).

Once I rebooted and was running my original instance of XP, I resized the partions using the freeware EASEUS Partition Manager 3.0 Home Edition (http://www.partition-tool.com/).

I'm not back and business. All the tools above are highly recommended. I know that there are good commerical alternatives, but I didn't want to spend the money for a one-off operation.

I've gotten some good pointers here, so I am sure someone else will find this useful.

What's the difference between cloning and imaging? By purchasing a Seagate drive you are entitled to a free download of DiscWizard, which is a limited version of True Image.

In my mind imaging writes partitions to a file, cloning makes an exact replica. In my case I had multiple partitions that made up nearly 150GB worth of data. I wanted to move from one drive to another, and if I had to "image," I would have had to find a temporary spot (e.g. my network, which would have slowed down the process).

I tried the Seagate tool at first, but it didn't work. Not sure whether this was because of the fact that the drive I used was OEM or not.

Regardless, I would recommend Clonezilla.