Is it possible to backup whole windows and restore it on another hdd?

[sohaibrazzaq]

Ok, i have never used any backup programs before, i manually backup my important documents & data on my external hdd's.

But now thats what i want to do if at all possible. I currently have 5 hdd's installed in my pc and my Windows 7 is installed on my oldest and smallest 320gb seagate hdd. To make things worse, thats the only hdd i have partitioned into 2, which means my windows drive is only 160gb and its a slow hdd. I just want to get rid of that hdd and hook another 2tb in my pc and install windows on my WD cavier black 1tb which is a decent drive if not the fastest, no ssd for me atm

Now here is the deal, my current windows installation hails from late 2009 and its still running fine without significant slowdowns (My vista never lasted more then 8-10 months) so as everyone imagines, i have just numerous amount of software's/updates/games installed. To make things worse, most of my games are digital downloads from steam/blizzard and if i reinstall i will have to re-download them again. Just starcraft 2 and WoW installer are about 40gb and i have no backup for them.

What i want to do is, possibly install a program (preferably free) that can make a 1:1 image of my whole windows installation on an external HDD and restore that image on a different hdd on the same pc. I guess windows should run fine without having to reactivate since only hdd is being changed, mobo/processor/ram etc and everything else is same. Is it possible?

Edit: Got a link which explains to do this with windows backup and restore: http://www.pagestart.com/win7bckuprstrnhd072610.html

Gonna try this later today

[Poppa_Meth]

Pretty much any backup software can do this. Clonezilla is probably the most popular free one but isn't that easy to navigate. You'd be better off just cloning from one drive to the other instead of backup and restore for what you are trying to do.

[Bjs]

1: Macurium reflect ... able to mount images enabling user files to be extracted.
2: Paragon backup and recovery 2011

[jagabo]

Most of the drive manufacturers give away (included with boxed retail drives, free download from their web site) software that does this. As long as you have one drive from that manufacturer in the system. The drive you copy to or from doesn't have to be from that manufacturer. For example:

http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=DiscWizard&vgnextoid=d9fd4a3cd...00dd04090aRCRD

[Nelson37]

Any drive imaging program will do this, no problem. Everything will work just fine.

Ghost is my favorite, but Clonezilla also works well, just a bit tricky as mentioned.

Make ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN you can correctly identify your Source and Target hard drives, whatever program you use.

[handyguy]

I prefer Acronis but it's not free, but it does have a copy function you use when you get a new HD.