Over at Miray they have a bunch of useful little tools. Today I am drawing your attention to HDClone, it enables you to move the content from an entire hard drive to another, larger one. The program installs itself on a bootable floppy or CD, and include it`s own operating system, so it runs completely independent from Windows.
Once HDClone has created the bootable floppy or CD for you, you can use it to boot your computer and copy the drive content to the new (installed) drive, using a graphical interface. The free version is perfectly suitable to upgrade your existing drive to a larger one. It supports IDE/ATA/SATA hard disks and is able to copy up to 300 MB/min.
This allows you to create backups or copies of complete operating system installations smoothly. In combination with the special ‘SafeRescue’ mode of HDClone, this technique is also perfect for rescuing data in case of defective hard disks. Furthermore, HDClone works independent of partition layout, file system and operating system (i.e. it works with FAT, FAT32, NTFS, etc.). Thus, it also works with proprietary data formats which could not be accessed otherwise. Besides copying complete drives, it is also possible to apply it to certain partitions only.
The idea is to try out the Free Edition to find out if a certain PC system and its hard disks or other media are supported. It shows all supported and recognized drives, but some of them may only be usable with one of the higher editions.
The Free Edition makes a great alternative to Ghost or True Image (my current choice) for those once or twice a year occurrences.
A good deal and some of the other utilities are well worth a look too (the Network Sniffer caught my eye).