Which way to go in moving Windows 7 to another hard disk?

[emeu1]

Hello,

I have a Thinkpad Edge 13" with Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit) installed on.
It has the original 500Gb hard disk.
The hard disk is partitioned "Lenovo standard" (i.e. Windows 7 recovery partition as well as a normal Windows 7 partition (C:\ drive)).

I want to replace the hard disk by a faster 500Gb hard disk.

Now the question: what is the best way to proceed?

1. Clone the hard disk? (I have a desktop in which I could temporarily install the Thinkpad's current HD and the new, faster drive).
Which clone tool, preferably free software as I will do this action only one, is capable of doing this?
2. Make an image backup using Windows 7 and re-install this one. Has someone tried this before? Does this work? Second question is: can the recovery partition be copied this way as well?
3. Use the Rescue and Recovery tool from Lenovo?

Any suggestions, things to watch out for are welcome.

[Johan]

What you want is cloning your exising HDD to the new HDD. I'd suggest the following approach:

1. Get the new, faster HDD.

2. Back up any vital data from your existing ("slow") HDD to whatever safe media (external HDD, flash-USB or whatever).

3. Go to the manufacturer's homepage (of the new, faster HDD), and download their free cloning tool... most HDD manufacturers are making available such free tools, most of them based on Acronis True Image (yes, you need to search for this tool yourself!). Burn this tool to a bootable CD.

4. If you haven't already one, get an external USB-caddy which you mount your new HDD in. These cost from around $5 and up (see e.g. this). Alternatively you could have used a (much faster!) UltraBay 2nd HDD caddy, but I don't believe that a ThinkPad "Edge" support UltraBay, so this is probably not an option.

5. Mount, initialize, partition and format the new HDD that is placed in the external USB enclosure,

6. Take out the existing ("slow") HDD of your ThinkPad, and mount it in the external USB enclosure.

7. Mount the new, empty, freshly-formatted HDD in your ThinkPad.

8. Boot up on the free cloning-tool CD, and select clone. Source drive = The old, slow HDD in the external USB enclosure. Destination drive = The new, fast internal drive. This "cloning-from-old-external-HDD-to-new-internal-HDD" is an important step (search for many threads about this).

9. Once the cloning is completed, take out the CD, deattach the old USB-HDD, re-boot and enjoy!

That's about it. More information (although probably not needed) about cloning etc. in the threads Moving Windows 7 from Hard Drive to SSD and Moving Windows XP from Hard Drive to SSD, aligned partition and Install SSD into X100e single core with Win 7 and Replaced my hard drive - doesn't boot - please help!.

Johan