Free Hard Disk Cloning

A visitor asked by email if it possible to copy his entire hard drive to a new hard drive. The primary reason is that the new computer uses SATA ports and he has an IDE hard drive. So he wants to buy a new hard drive and put his existing data onto it.

My answer:

I found a piece of free software & instruction for you: http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live/doc/showcontent.php?topic=03_Disk_to_disk_clone

The softeware can do disk to disk cloning which is what you want to do. I think it might be able to do it to your external hard drive but I can't promise it (depends if the software sees the external hard drive). Its free so its worth a try.

If you can, back up your data just in case since you don't want to accidentally delete your good hard drive. This disk to disk mode will copy everything on your hard drive including the recovery partition. The only thing is that you may have a 1tb drive but only see 500gb because the original drive was 500gb. Vista/Win7 can expand it natively but XP can't. So you'd have to either expand it (not exactly saf except with paid tools because NTFS isn't well documented) or create another partition for the free space. That is up to you but the latter option is what I do.