Laptop died - looking for advice

[djdube525]

One more tidbit on SSDs... there definitely seems to be two classes of drive makers reliability wise... Intel & Crucial on the high reliability, and everyone else. You do tend to pay a little more though.

That said I have a 60G OCZ drive in my desktop that's well over a year and a half old and have had no issues whatsoever.

[mfsoa]

OK, the laptop pretty much fixed itself and has been running great.

But I did get a new HD and a USB enclosure for it.

To clone the current HD, do I just format the new drive and copy the c:\ to it?  And then if the current drive poops out, I'll be able to simply pop the new one in and I'm set?

Thanks again for everyone's help!

-Mike

[tmazz]

OK, the laptop pretty much fixed itself and has been running great.

But I did get a new HD and a USB enclosure for it.

To clone the current HD, do I just format the new drive and copy the c:\ to it?  And then if the current drive poops out, I'll be able to simply pop the new one in and I'm set?

Thanks again for everyone's help!

-Mike

No, unfortunately you need to use some kind of drive image software since a simple copy command will not set up and populate the boot sectors. Unfortunately I have not been keeping current with that end of the software market so I cannot recommend any free or commercial software to do it. Do any of our more computer savvy members have something they can suggest?