Hello, I have this HP laptop and it has a 40gb hard disk. Now I have a bought a new 80gb hard disk and have set it as an external disk in a USB disk closure hardware. Now I want to place this 80gb hard disk into the laptop without the need of reinstalling the thousands of softwares I have installed and all the data. I heard for a normal drive mounted in the system, you could create a mirror that would copy partitions and everything exactly so the new hard drive will work with the same data the previous hard disk had, without any kind of loss and/or booting issues. Is there any solution if I need to do it using the USB external closure for now? That's because my laptop has space for only one hard disk so I can't place both hard disks at the same time. Any idea? After the mirror is created on this disk in USB, I will place it in the laptop. Any help will be appreciated :) .. Thanks very much!!!

Google for Symantec Ghost, or for Acronis TrueImage. i_XpUser

But they can be used for creating and storing a mirror file to external USB disk. I want to "write" this image (data and all files) on the USB disk instead of just placing the image file. Placing an image file surely won't boot up to windows xp when I place this hard disk in the laptop. *confused* Thanks for your reply :) .

Ghost allows you to write an exact copy of the 40GB HDD to the 80GB HDD. I've done this with IDE HDDs but I have never done this from an IDE or SATA HDD to a HDD in a USB enclosure.

You have ntbackup already too.

I back up a laptop from ghost DOS by this method. I use a usb external hdd enclosure with the extra hdd. Then a usb external floppy drive. Boot the ghost floppy from the external usb floppy drive and CLONE the system to the usb external hdd. Then replace the hdd.