I highly endorse the EASUS products. Two are needed to do what you are trying to do - both free.

1. http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/home-edition/

Note the sector by sector copy capability. When I had a failing hard drive with some bad sectors that I was trying to clone to a new drive, this was the only software that would power through the bad sectors. Acronis would bomb on the bad sectors and simply stop the copy process. The bundled software that came with the latest Seagate drive that I bought did the same thing. It wasn't until trying this EASUS product that I was able to copy the whole drive, bad sectors and all.

2. Once the clone is made (usually to a larger drive), then use EASUS Partition Master to set up the partitions on the new drive the way that you want them. http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

Great 1-2 combination from this company - can't speak highly enough of them.

Now, that was all with Win XP Pro and putting the cloned drives back into the machines that the original drive came from (I don't know if Windows somehow looks at the processor ID in some fashion to determine whether the copy of windows belongs with the machine or not).

Most replacement hard drives will come bundled with some type of disk imaging/copying software. My case was a little unique as the original drive was failing to begin with. I think that Seagate bundles an OEM version of Acronis with it's off-the-shelf hard drives. Try whatever ships with the replacement drive first.

-Scott

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