Copying drives

[chameleon]

I don't trust the hard drive I have in my machine at the moment and I don't have a very good track record with them (had three die on me over the years)
I have a new sata drive the same to plumb into my setup. whats the easiest way to do a complete copy from the old drive to the new one, system files inluded?
Also my drive is badly fragmented, when I copy it will it do a mirror image file or a sequential file transfer and defrag as it goes?

 

[semi-pro waster]

Is your old hard drive SATA as well? Something like Norton Ghost or Anachros TrueImage will provide you with an exact copy but if the old hard drive is not SATA then you might need to put the SATA drivers onto it before it will boot(this depends on how old your motherboard is and how the manufacturer implemented SATA).

It is a mirror image copy as far as I am aware, there may be options for defragging but I seriously doubt it, I'd say just get it working first then consider cleaning the drive up. Having a working drive is much more important than a tidy one.

 

[Snapshot]

Ghost copies file-by-file so it will defrag the drive.

Jonathan