My C drive is almost full, even after a sweep and defrag, so I have decided to replace C drive with a new drive that has a much larger capacity. What is the best software to "Ghost" the entire contents from C onto this new drive, then take out the old drive, and install the new drive, so I don't have to reinstall all my software and OS, and spend weeks messing around to get all my settings back to how I like them.

I use PowerQuest DriveImage (actally a re-packaged version of Norton Ghost) not free though.

I've not come across a good (ie working) free utility all seem to have some quirk or other

My C drive is almost full, even after a sweep and defrag, so I have decided to replace C drive with a new drive that has a much larger capacity. What is the best software to "Ghost" the entire contents from C onto this new drive, then take out the old drive, and install the new drive, so I don't have to reinstall all my software and OS, and spend weeks messing around to get all my settings back to how I like them.

xxclone, is free and works very well

XXCLONE Freeware http://www.snapfiles.com/Freeware/system/fwbackup.html

Just make the new disk Bootable using the option under the "cool tools tab"

xxclone looks awesome, thanks for the tip

I use Ghost, but of course it's not free. It's saved me from hard-drive meltdown now twice. I assume that Ghost will be A LOT faster than xxclone because the latter does a normal file copy.

I have millions of files on my HD so normal file copy takes _forever_ and then some. I watched the HD transfer rates, and they hover around 600KB with file transfer for lots of small files, whereas they are around 15MB/s with Ghost. It's 2 hours vs 2 days.

You have any Seagate or Maxtor drives, you can download discwizard from seagate.com. Free.

True image is one of the best packages in this field.

I use mainly HD-Clone Pro. which you can also use to clone a drive to and from USB drives!

Thanks for your input guys