Transferring entire system?

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I wish to change the HDD in my laptop, however since moving i cannot find the windows disks for my laptop and panasonic are refusing to replace them, and microsoft says its their responsibility to do so!!

Anyway - is it possible to transfer the entire contents of my existing drive, OS, programs, data the works from the old drive to the new one??
 
one thing i will say, by "mirroring" you old os and HDD contents onto a new drive, your os will become slower. a new instalation is always preferable
 
one thing i will say, by "mirroring" you old os and HDD contents onto a new drive, your os will become slower. a new instalation is always preferable

Eh? He's just replacing the hardware, won't be any slower than it was before. I know a fresh install cleans out the garbage and so is faster, but he would lose all apps and datafiles so I assumed not an option?
 

I mirrored by old sata drive onto a new drive, replaced nothing else and it had changed the boot time from under 30 secs to around 90 secs. I have been told by a friend of mine (who runs a computer maintenance company) that this is common, a fresh install is always better :)
 
I quite often restore a ghost image to my boot drive and it makes no difference.

Yes me too on a daily basis using ghost 11 restoring customers images out onsite, and it makes not the slightest bit of difference whatsoever, it's a like for like copy. Ghost has truly got me out of the **** over the years, It's helped me clone plenty of failing old fujitsu 10 and 20gb drives in the past :D
 
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I gave up on Acronis, after two separate versions (7 and 9, IIRC) stopped cloning my system (which is how I backup to removeable drive) after working for 6 months. No response from Acronis on their support forums either and I wasn't the only person to suffer such problems!

I now use DriveClone by FarStone and it clones your system disk from inside XP!
 
I gave up on Acronis, after two separate versions (7 and 9, IIRC) stopped cloning my system (which is how I backup to removeable drive) after working for 6 months. No response from Acronis on their support forums either and I wasn't the only person to suffer such problems!

I now use DriveClone by FarStone and it clones your system disk from inside XP!


I've never come across this one before - I've always been happy with Acronis.
The universal restore thingy (whilst I'm not a big fan of it) has gotten me out of the warm brown stuff a couple of times.
 
One tip for the OP, both Acronis and DriveClone have downloadable demos that work for 2 weeks (IIRC), so, if this were to be a one-off clone, you can always try before you decide not to buy :)
 
Yeah I also use acronis, but you can also download the most windows images from msdn if I remember correctly as I done that when sp3 was released to save me slip streaming every single version (retail/oem) of pro and home.
 
Well it seems i have plenty of options.

I understand that a fresh install is always preferrable however its not possible as i dont have the media to do so on this machine and no way of getting replacement disks.
 
+1 for Acronis 11, I have jobs like this all the time and it has never let me down. I just pop the new drive into a usb box and clone. rip replace and jobs a good'un :D
 
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