Best way to copy one hard drive to another?

[chouchou]

So i'm getting an advance RMA through WD for my 640GB Caviar.
I'd like to backup everything that's on my current HD to my new one before i send the defective one with bad sectors back.
What is the best way to do this? Plug in the other HDD and format then proceed to copy/paste?
Or is there another way to directly transfer files right over? I need it to be exactly the same because of file allocations and paths.

Thanks HWC

[SugarJ]

See ideas recently discussed in this thread about cloning hard drives.

file transferring

[bojangles]

chouchou that's what I did and it worked...pretty simple really...

[chouchou]

sweet, thanks. :)

[frontier204]

Don't forget to wipe (not just format) your HDD before sending it in! Techs have fun gathering statistics on private data found on HDDs.
For the HDD I donated over to my research group I used DBAN: Darik's Boot And Nuke | Hard Drive Disk Wipe
For the HDD I just RMA'd to PcCyber/Samsung I used Linux's "badblocks" in destructive write mode.

[attonbitusira]

Acronis TrueImage has a great clone disk utility that works in the shareware version.

[matsta31]

I use Maxblast, available on segate website. But you need at least on seagate product in your Hard drive collection. Imaging works everytimes to perfection.

[Shadowmeph]

What I have done ( depending on the amount of the drive) is just Cut and paste its faster then copy paste. and like most everyone has sugested make sure your wipe the drive a few time to make sure that know one can pull any scrap info off it

[dhoshaw]

I just did this the other day. Acronis also has a fully functional 15 day trial of their True Image Home 2009 available at Download backup software trial of HDD ghosting, data backup and restore software for home and home office PCs; worked great.

[grinder]

yup.. the Acronis True Image Home program is a gooder and has been a part of my tool-box since version 9. I've purchased every version since. If only it worked on servers =P