Copying all contents of one computer to put onto another [duplicate]

"You should use two tools:

An imaging software like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image or partimage to create an image of the disk drive you can then put into another disk.
(optional) A partition resizing tool like parted or Partition Magic.

Then you have to:

Create an image of the laptop using the imaging tool
Install that image in the target computer (will erase hard drive contents), but this will leave you with a 20 GB partition only
Create a different partition with the rest of the disk or resize it to full disk size with the partition resizing tool

It's not particularly hard, but things can go wrong especially in the partition resizing department. I suggest you make a trial run (in a non important disk/machine) if you have the time an resources to do so."

"Use snapshot (www.drivesnapshot.de). Assuming you have enough disk space on the old laptop you can snapshot the old C: drive to a file on the drive (i.e. snapshot the disk to itself; sounds odd but it works). Now boot the new laptop of a WinPE or BartPE CD and map a drive to the C: disk on the old laptop. Run snapshot and you can restore the snapshot onto the new laptop.

When Snapshot restores the image it can grow it to use whatever size disk you have in the new laptop. Best of all there is a free eval version that will be fine for the one occasion you need to use it.

Booting off a CD and connecting to the old laptop is easy for long time network nerds like me, but can be daunting for the beginner. If you run into problems doing it post here and I'll try and help.

John Rennie"

If one of your hard drive is either Seagate or Maxtor, you can use Maxtor MaxBlast as the Acronis software replacement since it's just a rebranded version of the same program but limited in some areas. Notice that if no Seagate or Maxtor hardisks are found, the software will refuse to work.

CloneZilla(i link to wiki as the site is down at the moment), or NortonGhost may be of use here, although there will be an element of risk involved. You may be better getting this done professionally in order to avoid data loss unless you are entirely comfortable with what you are doing.

"Please note that if this is Windows we're talking about - before you do the image, reset the disk controller driver to a generic ata or sata one - or it will bluescreen on new hardware (including virtual hardware) requiring advanced and often unsupported recovery procedures.

Some (not all) P2V migration tools will do this for you, but most just instruct you how to prepare the system for the migration manually.

Besides this note, I agree with Zoredache about migrating it to a virtual machine as a starter. Unless the applications in question require special hardware-level access, you might want to always run this as a virtual machine on whatever new hardware and operating system you get in the future as well - instead of trying to image this thing to all new machines directly."