Hard drive cloning

So the slow down on my work laptop had become unbearable.  I went through the rigors of trying multiple virus scanners and adware scanners and found nothing.  I regularly checked the system manager to see if there was any sort of run away program, but since I mainly use email and a browser there were no culprits to be found.

I had my suspicions that I was dealing with a failing hard drive.  In all my years computing I have never actually had a hard drive fail, but the tell tale clicking when it was trying to access the HDD was a give away.  I just let it keep going though because besides the long loading times it was somewhat bearable.  It has not failed completely yet, but the slow downs and hang-ups were no longer bearable.

I replaced the failing HDD with a SSD I had laying around, and now the computer is snappy and responsive.  I re-installed Ubuntu on it and besides not having much space left (It was only 30GB and I synced dropbox and two gmail accounts through Thunderbird) it is working quite well.  I tested a few other Linux distros I had lying around, but Ubuntu picked up the wireless driver out of the box.

So the first order of business was making sure I have all the proper hardware around pull this off.  I have an external enclosure for SATA drives, I have the old drive, and a new slightly larger hard drive, and an 8.0GB SanDisk USB stick.

With that acquired the process will be this:

1. Make the USB stick a bootable device
2. Install Cloning Software/Distro onto said device
3. Install new HDD into laptop
4. Hook up old HDD into external enclosure
5. Boot laptop from USB stick
6. Clone and enjoy