TECHS: Best solution for transferring data to new drive?
 

Just wondering what the easiest method is for transferring one hard drive's contents to another. I've got a hard drive that is on its last legs.

I was going to just slap in a new hard drive and set the old drive as slave and do a fresh install of XP on the new drive, but then I have to go through the tedious task of installing all my programs again.

Is there any software that can help me transfer the data without having to reinstall everything?

I am going to buy a new hard drive today, is there any portable hard drives I should be looking at while I am there that would make this easier?

Thanks.

Symantec's Norton Ghost

:thumbsup

This all depends on how much $$ you are willing to part with...

Acronis TrueImage and Ghost work great. I've also used Paragon DriveImage to mule drive contents.

Not much in the freeware arena, there's a few...but not reliable enough to trust for production machines.

Depending on the drive you get the drive manufacturer may include a util to do this, Seagate drives come bundled with software to transfer old data to the new drive.

hth...