Best program to clone an SATA HD in a laptop?

[Hard and Confused]

I just got a 7200 RPM 100gb 16mb cache HD to replace the 4200 RPM 100gb 8mb cache HD in my GF's laptop and I was wondering who can tell me what the est/fastest program is going to be to clone the OS and all data from the older slower HD to the newer faster one.

[Joe Average]

The software that came with the drive, if it was a retail product. If not, then go to the manufacturer's website (for either the old drive or the new one, shouldn't matter) and find their drive software which should give you drive-to-drive capability for cloning.

If not, or if you can't hook up both drives in that manner, you'll probably need something to do an image of the old drive complete, then store that someplace (network drive or attached USB external is usually the most convenient places), and then put the new drive in and restore the image, using the software so it will 'expand' the size automagically. Acronis True Image can do this type of operation pretty easily, and it's still one of my most recommended applications.

A lot of people might tell you just xcopy the contents over, but that doesn't quite work out right more often than not. A proper drive-to-drive is the preferred solution; second choice is making the image of the original then restoring it to the new drive.

Good luck...

[Martel-fs]

If you're cloning in a windows machine, you can use dd for windows. Otherwise you can boot to a linux livecd and just use regular dd.

[The_Engineer]

this guy here
http://www.fogproject.org/
is supposed to be pretty good. No personal experience though
FOG = Free Open source Ghost