Cloning my Hard Drive...

[meadowlands]

I was having some problems with my parents WD 160GB HDD. it was making some noises then freezing the computer. Now, it suddenly stopped doing that and is working fine, however I already did an RMA. I wanted to clone this HDD and put it on the new one. What is the best way to accomplish this task without having to reinstall windows and all the drivers and stuff on my current HDD? Thanks!

 

[horstmann]

use the free trial version of Acronis True Image. It works awesome. It will copy everything to a new partition on the new drive, then you just plug it in and your computer doesn't even know you changed anything.

 

[meadowlands]

Do I need to Make the new HDD my slave , clone the other, then make the slave the master?

 

[horstmann]

Yes, exactly. You have the right idea. When you clone using acronis, you will get it all set up to clone in windows, then the program will restart your computer and clone the drive without starting windows. I think it took 15-20 minutes on my computer to clone. Also do not partition the new drive as acronis will do that for you.