Copying an entire hard drive onto another and using it?

[eurocracy]

My current hard drive is tiny, only a measly 120GB and it's running out of space. I can't fit any more games or anything on it anymore and I have to keep swapping between installing and uninstalling them. It's also an ancient IDE drive that is around 5-6 years old and might not hold up much longer. I'm looking at new SATA 1TB hard drives that would replace this drive but I need to know this first:
If I buy this new hard drive, can I copy EVERYTHING, including the OS and all the programs over, format the old one (after testing) and then just run the new drive just like I did before with my other drive, it would really save me a lot of trouble of messing around with the OEM OS and reinstalling everything all over again.
Is there a program or anything that does this or something I can do?

 

[eurocracy]

I'm currently looking at XXCLONE for doing this as it creates self-bootable hard drive copies.
It doesn't support vista, yeah...

 

[DragonD]

You COULD also keep your 120G drive as your boot/os drive, and move all your games/music/data/whatever to the secondary drive.

 

[Snipeye]

Or install the operating system, and set the old 120GB as a data drive, and you can just move your docs and other files from it to your new one. Either option will work.

 

[arcadesdude]

I used to use Ghost for this kind of copy entire drive job but I use clonezilla live on a usb stick now as it is more versitile and supports all modern OS's including mixed/dual-boot Mac/PC drives.

 

[eurocracy]

Or install the operating system, and set the old 120GB as a data drive, and you can just move your docs and other files from it to your new one. Either option will work.

You COULD also keep your 120G drive as your boot/os drive, and move all your games/music/data/whatever to the secondary drive.

Like I said, I'm not looking to do that, I just need to know how to make a new 1TB drive a bootable backup drive in effect. The wiring that I have used for my IDE drive is horrible and the cable is under tension and twisted, it really does need to be removed, the drive itself could die at any time considering the age of it.

 

[Jubei]

Some drives will come with software to facilitate the cloning process, otherwise use something like Clonezilla. The process if usually very simple and easy (even for the lay person).

On the other hand, this may be an excuse to do a clean install to reduce windows bloat, clutter and other misc OS issues.