I have almost filled my current hard drive and have purchased a larger one, so what I would like to do is transfer my current ahrd drive to the new one giving me an exact copy of what Im using at the moment but obviously on a bigger drive. What software is available and what's best to use as I dont really know what to look for. Will I need to partition the drive first woth FDISK and format it before I use some sort of software?

The term you are lookicg for is CLONING. Norton Ghost is one option (not free) Often drive manufacturers provide their version of cloning software when you buy a new harddrive. Here's another. Fully functional 15 day trial version. http://www.drive-image.com/ I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

Virtually every drive manufacturer provides all the software you need for free on their Websites. Jimi_l

Acronis True Image will do this for you. Not free.

use Ghost, disk to disk clone!

Making a backup of a hard drive with windows XP Home or Professional can be difficult or even imposible in some cases. If you use symantec's Ghost then use only version 6.5 (2002). It is the best version to use. They claim as in all versions copying Windows XP is not possible. But it works. I was surprised, because I'd just used their version 6.5 to do what Symantec said it wasn't capable of! Admittedly, Ghost v6.5 is pretty cranky when attempting to clone a personal bootable back up of your clean install to a hard drive that is smaller than the one that you have your clean install on. You'll have to use the switches -fni and -ffs located on the HDD tab of Ghost v6.5 to make it work, but cloning to a larger hard drive is no problem using Ghost v6.5 with Windows XP Professional or Home or even Corporate Edition! Software manufacturers are currently hard at work producing newer versions of their software programs that will be fully compatible with Windows XP operating systems. The only method on the shelf today that satisfied my cloning desires is Symantec's Ghost packaged with Norton's SystemWorks 2002. The Ghost bundled with Norton's System Works 2002 is version 6.5 Being the type to read the small print, I found that Symantec's website clearly states that users of Windows XP Professional are unable to use Ghost v6.5 successfully and that Windows XP Professional users MUST purchase their Enterprise version with Ghost 7.0 to produce a cloned, bootable drive. Making a bootable personal backup of Windows XP to have on hand to restore a system your Windows XP system isn't as easy as it might seem at first. Computer professional of 23 years!

I used the Norton Ghost( the 2003 version)to clone my 2 disk XP pro NTFS system of RAID 0 (80G+80G=160G) onto a single 80G EIDE. The data did not exceed the capacity of the target disk of course. I then put in the single 80G NTFS EIDE to replace the 2 disk Raid 0 system. It worked without any trouble. I lost much performance but gained more security. I also use Norton Ghost to regularely backup ( not clone )my system and to do restores when needed.