System imaging tools and image transfer

[lapon]

I want to upgrade my hard drive to a new, faster, quieter one. Are there any recommendations on inexpensive or demo-ware hard drive copy programs? I've seen lots of SSDs sold with some software, often Norton Ghost. Its a bit expensive at $70 for what I want, though. If I need to, I think I will get Ghost, but I wanted to ask to see if there was another way. Also, could I use the built in system within Windows? I'm running Win7 and it looks like it can make a disk image, but I would have to store it on a network, as I do not have a third hard drive to put it on. Anyone know if an install disk can recover from a network location? Thanks for all your help and suggestions!

[ces]

I have been very pleased with farstone's drive clone. I use release 6. It is so much easier than Acronis.... and from what I read, more reliable.

It permits me to create a bootable CD from which to run it. As it is then, when running of the CD, running on its own operating system presumably it will continue to work with future releases of Windows.

[lodestar]

It might be worth looking at the free to download Clonezilla http://www.clonezilla.org/.

However Mirai HD Clone would be somewhat easier to use and there is a free edition http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html#versions. You can go the bootable optical disk route with HD Clone just like the other hard drive copiers/imagers. Alternatively the Mirai product can be run from within Windows itself, including Windows 7. This is feature of all the versions so you could try it with the free release.