Hi Saikee.

Fantastic information, friend. Its well appreciated that you go the extra, clear step in explaining the processes. It can be daunting to one-time cloners like myself.

I have a question, i hope you or anyone here can help, as i will be cloning my HD as soon as possible.

My laptop HD died recently and i had a new one installed under warranty. At first, great. Only, i use the computer [toshiba laptop] for audio purposes, and the repair shop installed a 4,200rpm drive [SATA / 2.5" 200g], whereas the old [dead] one was a 5,200rpm [SATA / 2.5" 200g]. Thats now unacceptable speed and performance wise so i've decided to buy a W.D. 7,200rpm [SATA / 2.5" 200g+] drive and Migrate/Clone my VISTA OS and all files.

But Toshiba's have a 'HIDDEN VISTA INSTALL PARTITION' on their factory drives, as the units dont come shipped with a Vista DVD.

Will the Linux LiveCD DD function recognise this hidden partition? I'm assuming so thus far, as you have stated that the process is simply cloning '1's and '0's, but need to be sure.

Alongside this, I am planning to do the transfer within my SATA Desktop PC. The reason for this is my laptop can currently only support a single drive. I will be unplugging ALL of my desktops SATA drives and plugging in my existing VISTA 2.5" drive and the to-be-cloned 2.5" drive, then booting into Linux. After the clone i will shut down the desktop, install the newly cloned drive into the laptop and hope i dont have to re-certify vista.

This seem like a perfect plan?

Also, do you still reccomend either of the two bootable LiveCD's from the first post in this thread as the best ones for uneducated Linux users? and does anyone have a link?

Thanks in advance peoples!