copying & replacing hd

[George]

Originally Posted by ddouglass

Since you are talking about a laptop with one internal drive you can't use George's cloning method because there is no way to hook the new drive up as an external. His method is great for a desktop with capability to hook up multiple internal drives but not for a laptop.
What Upnext said is the only way you can do this on a laptop. Norton and Acronis can both create images which is a compressed save of the drive and does not require resetting any registrations. I have used drive image files to load thousands of like computers for the Air Force to set them up identical for classroom use. Believe me it works great.
Norton and Acronis will both create bootable CD for installing the program to load the image file and you don't have to load Windows first.

Read my post. I never said to hook the new drive up as an external.

The back up drive is the external and will remain the back up drive.

What I proposed is no different than using a USB drive as a back up, so don't say it won't work. You may have your preferred method regarding clone vs imaging. Like I said earlier it's a matter of choice.

The whole object was to reolace the laptop hd to begin with, not just to backip.

I could care less which method he selects, but please don't insult my intelligence by saying what I posted won't work.