Bought a new laptop hard drive, how do I swap data to new one?

LIke the title says, I just bought a 320gb Scorpio Black for my Laptop. I want to clone everything from the old hard drive onto the new one but I need a program. I have a 2.5" external enclosure. Does anybody know of a good free program to help do this?

If the original drive is Seagate

Seagate branded Acronis True Image: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/discwizard

Or

Western Digital branded Acronis True Image: http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119&wdc_lang=en

Pretty much all manufacturers provide software with their drives (or if it's a bare drive you can download it) that will do a "drive copy" type operation to transfer the entire installation from the old drive to the new one. As mentioned above, Seagate/Maxtor and Western Digital provide a free version of True Image - but don't use it for making an image, that's a waste of time and space. Use the Tools option (if you use True Image) and there's an option for doing a "Drive Copy" or clone disk operation which happens disk-to-disk in real-time with no image required in between.

If you have some other brand of drive, check the website for the manufacturer of that drive, I'm sure they'll have some software of some kind to help out. If it was a retail drive in the box, etc, it should have come with some disc with that kind of app on it.

If you are using win7, the OS has its own imaging software; which I learned not too long ago on this forum.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/4241/how-to-create-a-system-image-in-windows-7/

The original drive is a Hitachi 160gb btw. Im trying the acronis true image software.

Got it swapped over, thanks alot fellas!

We use Acronis all of the time. I personally like Home 2010 over 2011 as it is easier to handle more than a few clones at a time. The 2011 version seems to automatically start cloning when a new drive is plugged in, even if you tell it not to.