04-11-2013, 05:56 PM
Unsurprisingly, I also agree with the Clonezilla recommendation. I just used it last week to upgrade the hard drive in my Windows 7 HTPC. I had to use the flash drive version since the computer only has two SATA ports and no IDE channels, so I had to unplug the internal Blu-Ray drive in order to plug in both hard drives.
Everything carried over perfectly. No reactivation, no re-entering serial numbers, nothing. The only thing I had to do was drop into Disk Management and tell the new drive to use all of the "unused" space. (Since it cloned a 250 GB partition onto a 2 TB drive, it ended up with 1.5+ TB of unused, unformatted space. It took about two mouse clicks to "expand" the 250 GB to the full 2 TB.)
Everything carried over perfectly. No reactivation, no re-entering serial numbers, nothing. The only thing I had to do was drop into Disk Management and tell the new drive to use all of the "unused" space. (Since it cloned a 250 GB partition onto a 2 TB drive, it ended up with 1.5+ TB of unused, unformatted space. It took about two mouse clicks to "expand" the 250 GB to the full 2 TB.)