Copying an entire SATA drive to another

[SILVERWOLF]

So I just bought a new hard drive. It's nearly identical to the one I have now (SATA II, 250 GB, Western Digital Caviar) with the only difference being a 16 mb cache instead of the 8 meg cache in my current hard drive.

So, what I want to do is copy everything from my current drive to the new drive so that it's like nothing happened. I really don't want to have to reformat and go through all that trouble.

Are there any good, free programs that any of you have used to do this? Thanks.

[Skummel Maske]

Is it your primary drive? I mean, if it's the drive you've got your OS installed on, it might be tricky. Otherwise it should be no problem at all.

[SILVERWOLF]

Is it your primary drive? I mean, if it's the drive you've got your OS installed on, it might be tricky. Otherwise it should be no problem at all.

Yeah, it's my primary drive. I used a program called Max Blast 3 back in the day when I was using IDE to do what I want to do now, but that's ancient history.

[DJ SymBiotiX]

I found a program called "Acronis True Image Home". You can make an exact copy of your current harddrive (assuming you have somewhere to temporarity store it). Then you can take that drive out, put in the new one, and use the acronis boot disk to copy the drive you stored directly on to the new drive. Doing this should just work. I did it once, worked fine.

[phill]

If you have a linux live cd, the 'dd' command can be very helpful. If you have vista, imagex is also very helpful.