How to duplicate Restore and OS partitions on new drive?

[asiafish]

Okay, so my X220 should arrive tomorrow or Thursday, and my mSATA (Intel 310 40 GB) and Hitachi 320 GB 7mm should arrive tomorrow. I do not have an ultrabase or external DVD drive, but have plenty of USB hard drives. Here is what I want to do, can someone please guide me to a FAQ for how? I don't mind buying an application like Acronis is that will make this possible.

I want to install the 40 GB mSATA and make it a clone of the original 128 GB SSD, recovery and OS partitions both. This is likely the hard part, so any help will be greatly appreciated.

Then I can remove the SSD and install the HDD. With the HDD in place and the X220 booting from the mSATA, how do I map the default locations for everything to the HDD in Windows 7? I want all preference files, mail databases (Outlook), documents, downloads, iTunes data to go to the HDD without any intervention required when I save or rip in music. Does simply dragging my home folder accomplish this, or is there more to it?

Thanks all,

Andrew

[noahw]

Did you look into clonezilla at all? That should be able to copy both partitions verbatim from the HDD to the SSD. As far as pointing your data files, that might be trickier. iTunes has support for external libraries so that shouldn't be an issue, And I know you can (at leas this was the case in windows xp, don't know for sure about 7) change the my document's folder location within windows, but as far as programs, etc., I'm not really sure.

[asiafish]

Did you look into clonezilla at all? That should be able to copy both partitions verbatim from the HDD to the SSD. As far as pointing your data files, that might be trickier. iTunes has support for external libraries so that shouldn't be an issue, And I know you can (at leas this was the case in windows xp, don't know for sure about 7) change the my document's folder location within windows, but as far as programs, etc., I'm not really sure.

Never heard of Clonezilla. I have Acronis 2009,hopefully that will do it. I don't want to use restore media as I've already installed a few applications and started configuring the machine, which would be a real pain to redo.

That 128 GB SSD sure is filling up fast, so getting that 320 GB in there will be a welcome cross-grade.