Replacing HD with SSD: How do I duplicate everything including OS?

[l88bastard]

Hi, I have a G50V laptop and I am replacing the hard drive with a SSD. The laptop has two storage bays for hard drives so I put the SSD in the second bay for now. I want to make the SSD the primary drive so what is the easiest way to duplicate everything (including the OS) onto the second drive?

Thanks for any help!

 

[ckryan]

There are a number of utilities available. Many manufacturers have cloning software for their drives, like Intel for example.

I like Acronis, but there are some free utilities like DD and clonezilla.

 

[ckryan]

Just double check when you get done to make sure the utility has correctly aligned the partition.

 

[ckryan]

What SSD are you using?

 

[Forceman]

WD has a free cloning tool available on their website if one of the drives is WD. Otherwise you can use something like Clonezilla, or even the built-in Win 7 backup and restore (assuming you have a third drive to put the backup on).

http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119