How do you move data from an old hard drive?

You can try putting in the new disk into a hard disk enclosure, plugging it into your old computer via USB, creating an image of your old drive through True Image or something, then writing that image to your new hard disk.

Acronis and Symantec's GHOST are the BEST WAY
for cloning your C: partition entirely.

Also, for the future, size your C: partition at 20-30GB,
and format the rest as a data partition: this will help
if/when you need to restore a drive image of C:,
which will overwrite all files as of the moment
that drive image file was created.

With data files on a separate partition, that problem goes away.

If your drive image file saved a large C: partition, however,
the new partition must be at least as large as the old one:
GHOST will err if you try to restore a drive image to a
partition that is smaller than the source partition.

For data files generally, in Command Prompt (aka DOS window):

XCOPY folder D:\folder /s/e/v/d

If you add the /l option on the command line,
XCOPY will tell you which files it WILL copy
when you omit the /l option:

XCOPY folder D:\folder /s/e/v/d/l

Help is available too:

XCOPY /?

You can re-route "help" results into a text file:

XCOPY /? >xcopy.help.txt

MRFS

+^ These have been shown to work OK; note, however, I believe you need to get the software from the same manufacturer that makes your new (receiving) HD.

Also, don't get confused - you need "drive image" type software to move the HD that has your OS on it. You can't use "file copy" type software.

this is a good free program Easeus-Partition-Master-Home
http://download.cnet.com/Easeus-Pa [...] 63346.html