copying & replacing hd

[billyo]

Originally Posted by hwheeler43

Boy I don't want to get back into this much. I know what opinions are like. Here is my take on this. You have to be able to boot from something. Therefore creating a hard drive image on an external hard drive and creating a boot cd seem to be the way to go. You cannot boot to a new hard drive with no operating system.

If you wish to clone..then by all means clone. I will tell you that updating an image is about the easiest thing in the world to do. Restoring a new hard drive from that image is also easy. I do not get all the debate. In my mind imaging is the only way to go for a laptop and Cloning will work well for a desktop with a second internal hard drive installed. Have fun you all.

I just got done cloning my laptop, what i did was i bought the acronis true image 11 and i also bought an internal 160 gb hard drive and an enclosure, installed the software and , installed the hdd to the enclosure and plugged it in to my usb and i just clicked on clone ( i chose automatic ) and in 10 minutes , i got a brand new hard drive, took the old one out and put the new one in ..if you buy the box version it comes with the boot cd, dont need to create one..