Transfering data from old HDD to new HDD

[CyberDude]

I am about to order a new 60GB HDD for my X30.

What's the best way of moving everything over to the new drive? I have seen HDDcases with usb cables so you can use the drive as an external drive. Should get the case and copy everything over from the old drive to the new. What's the best software to use for copying everyhting over as an image?

[mpcook]

Here is what I have posted before regarding upgrade on an X31 to Hitachi 60gig 7200rpm.

Just thought I'd report on the hard drive upgrade to my Thinkpad X31. I
replaced the IBM Travelstar 20g 4200rpm with the Hitachi Travelstar 60g
7200rpm drive. I got the drive from Drive Solutions ($230) along with an
Apricorn EZGig USB 2.0 transfer kit ($44 with rebate). Received items in
about 3 days. The kit gives me a drive enclosure for the old drive so I can use it as a backup device, and has software to clone the new drive from the old drive. Everything went quite well and I am happy with the new drive. It is noticeably much faster than the old drive. The new drive has XP and hidden restore partition on it, along with all of my installed software and data.



Here are the steps I took:



1.. Ran scandisk and defrag on the original drive
2.. Backed up the old drive to my desktop PC via the network.
3.. Set the boot order in BIOS to boot from CD
4.. Removed old hard drive.
5.. Installed new hard drive into the X31
6.. Installed the old drive into the Apricorn enclosure
7.. Installed the Ultrabase w/ CD drive
8.. Booted the IBM Restore CD #1 in order to install the hidden partition
on the new drive - it prompted me to install the missing hidden partition.
9.. Stopped the Restore process to the new drive before WinXP was fully
installed
10.. Plugged the USB cable from Apricorn enclosure (old drive)
11.. Booted with the Apricorn clone software CD in Ultrabase CD drive
12.. I got an error message that the Apricorn (old drive) could not be
found
13.. Tried different USB port, no luck
14.. Swapped the hard drives back so the old was in the X31 and the new was in the external enclosure - this solved the problem.
15.. Clone software ran fine. Took about 3 hours.
16.. Swapped hard drives again, so the new drive was in the X31 and the old drive was in the enclosure.
17.. Booted X31 with new drive installed. It found new hardware and
rebooted.
18.. Everything booted up perfectly fine
19.. Old drive in external enclosure can be plugged into USB port for FAST backups.

[ibmuser]

I've used Acronis MigrateEasy. Superb program - works great.

Check it out here:

http://www.acronis.com/products/migrateeasy/

[CyberDude]

Thanks Mpcook. that's exactly what i was looking for.