Safest and easiest way to transfer EVERYTHING from my old hard drive to another

That process might be difficult, since the capacity of a CD for the .iso image file is VASTLY smaller than 1 TB.

However, cloning IS the answer, and moving to 2 TB from 1 is no problem, and the speeds are not a problem, just as Cystach says.

The easiest way to clone is by using a cloning utility, and you probably can get one for free as a download from the maker of your NEW 2 TB HDD. These companies often make such a utility available for just this purpose - moving to a bigger HDD - but they want to encourage you to buy THEIR HDD, so they customize their utility to copy ONLY to a HDD they made. Thus, if you bought a WD HDD, get their Acronis True Image WD Edition. If you bought a drive from Seagate, get their Disk Wizard. Each of these is a powerful group of utilities to do lots of stuff, so make sure you look at the user manual document that comes with, especially the section on Cloning. Given what you have here you probably can use a version that runs under Windows.

When you run it you must have both new and old HDD's installed in your machine, but no preparation needs to be done on the new unit. Partitioning and Formatting of the new unit will be done for you. There are two things I will draw your attention to.

1. It is VITAL as you start up that you specify correctly the SOURCE drive (your old 1TB unit) and the DESTINATION unit (the new one). Anything on the designated DESTINATION unit will be destroyed, so make sure that is NOT your old drive!

2. Your old drive probably has more than one Partition on it, as many do today. There will be one or two System Reserved Partitions that do not have any drive letter name and you never see them in normal work. These contain key parts and backup copies of the Windows OS and their contents almost never change. Then there will be one (maybe more?) larger Partiton(s) that you actually use as "drives" under Windows and these contain all your files.

The cloning utilities I've used, when faced with a HDD containing more than one Partition, default to making new Partitions on the new HDD unit in the same size Proportions as on the old. So, if your old unit had Partitions of 100 GB, 125 GB, and 700 GB, it would make the new drive look like 200 GB, 250 GB, and 1400 GB. HOWEVER, those first two Partitions do NOT have to be bigger - they will never hold more data than they do now. So you do NOT have to accept the default configuration. After you've set the SOURCE and DESTINATION units the utility will present you will a proposed setup and ask for you to approve. Do NOT simply hit "Enter" and approve. Use the menu system (here is where reading the manual helps!) to make the smaller system Partitions on the new HDD the SAME sizes as they were on the old one. Then you can make ALL of the remaining space into the one big Partition that will take your user files. Once you've got it set the way you want, THEN approve and let it work It will take a LONG time - many hours! - to do the job, so be very patient.

When the job is finished, shut down your system. Now disconnect and remove the old HDD. Then connect the new larger HDD to the SAME SATA port of the mobo that the old one was on. This will make it VERY simple for the mobo to find the correct HDD to boot from because it will be in the same place as it always was.

Store the old HDD in a safe place for a while. After you are SURE that all your stuff got cloned and there is NOTHING on the old HDD you need, then you can look up how to wipe it clean and re-use it for something.

If you want to make an identical clone, then yes anything on the 2tb will need to be saved on an external drive. Whats going to happen is when you do this, it will make an exact copy of your 1tb onto your 2tb and anything thats on the 2tb right now will be overwritten. So save that data and then clone the drive, then transfer the data back over.

Congratulations!

Glad we were able to help! Always feels good to help people out when they have a question. Feel free to pm me if you ever need anything! And thank you for the best solution.