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" I&amp;#039;ve run out of capacity on my laptop&amp;#039;s 30GB hard drive and would like to install a new, larger one. I&amp;#039;m not sure how to get my operating system and data onto the new drive before I install it. Is there an easy way to do this? Define &amp;quot;easy.&amp;quot; It shouldn&amp;#039;t be too difficult since you&amp;#039;re putting the new drive back in the same machine. That means your settings, drivers and applications won&amp;#039;t need to be reconfigured and can be copied onto the new drive. The difficulty with laptops, however, is that most of them have space for only one hard drive \u2014 so, you&amp;#039;ll need to find a way to plug your new drive into the laptop while the old drive is still installed. The easiest way is to use a USB 2.0 or FireWire hard-drive enclosure, available from any PC parts retailer, such as Newegg.com or Buy.com, for as little as $15. Make sure you get the right size and type drive and enclosure \u2014 laptops usually use 2.5-in. drives with a parallel ATA connection. Once you have your new drive in the enclosure that&amp;#039;s wired to your laptop, you&amp;#039;ll need to copy the data. Unfortunately, you can&amp;#039;t just copy and paste it from within Windows File Explorer \u2014 certain files wouldn&amp;#039;t be copied properly, and the partitions on the new drive wouldn&amp;#039;t be set up correctly for booting up. To make your new drive work like your old drive, you&amp;#039;ll need a disk &amp;quot;cloner.&amp;quot; There are a myriad of options, from commercial solutions such as the old favorite Ghost from Symantec ($70; symantec.com) and Copy Commander from VCom ($35; v-com.com) to free applications, such as MaxBlast from Maxtor, that come bundled with hard drives. If you&amp;#039;re comfortable mucking around with Linux/BSD, I&amp;#039;ve had great luck with the free g4u application. If you have a local file server, you can even send the disk image from your laptop to an FTP site, install the larger drive, then FTP it back to your laptop, obviating the need for a drive enclosure. If you&amp;#039;re looking for a simple all-in-one solution, Hitachi (hitachigst.com) makes a Notebook PC Upgrade Kit, which includes a 100GB hard drive, external enclosure and cloning software for $200. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/how-to/a1145/4206528/>