Getting New Harddrive for Laptop: Moving Installed Apps?

Question

Getting the hard drive in my laptop replaced tomorrow at work. I have a lot of programs installed on top of the standard company developer image.

My IT person says the company doesn't have software that can move the entirty of my hard drive (installed apps and all) from the old disk to the new, or ghosting software that can do it either. However, he said that if I can think of a way to do it (legally!), he would have no problem with it.

Are there free (or cheap) tools available that can accomplish this?

Answer 1

You may want to consider Clonezilla, which is a free and open-source replacement for the popular Symantec Ghost (formerly Norton Ghost) software.

If you can have someone take your hard drive out of your laptop and connect it to another computer, you can just create an image of the whole drive and copy it to the new drive before installing it. A good (free for personal use) utility for this would be DriveImage XML (which functions similar to the older Partition Magic for you Norton loving folks, but since it's been long discontinued, I think DriveImage is the clear winner here).

Answer 2

I am sorry that your IT person is not familiar with ImageX, the (free) Microsoft utility that is designed to do exactly what you are asking.