Storage Making Image of Current Hard Drive for RMA Replacement

Hi.

My new laptop has a semi-faulty hard drive. It works just fine, but makes crackling noises when the laptop is moved. I contacted ASUS and I am in the process of RMA'ing it for another one.

It is a 500GB Seagate ST9500325AS 5400RPM SATA II drive.

When I first opened the laptop out of its box, I immediately plugged in my USB flash drive and installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 x64. I then installed all the necessary drivers and software that I use. It was a few hours after this that it started making that sound.

So the hard drive works just fine, but makes weird noises. I'm getting a new hard drive (identical model) in the mail in a week. Would it be a good idea to make an image of the hard drive so that I can load up my current file system to the new hard drive when it comes? Keep in mind that this drive makes funny noises but seems to work just fine.

If so, how would I go about doing this? I assume I'd need to buy a 2.5" to 3.5" USB or SATA adapter/mounting kit from a store somewhere, and then use some sort of software to make a perfect image of the hard drive. What software would be the best to use?

Could there be problems in restoring an image of my system? (even though the new hard drive will be the exact same model, it's still a new hard drive) Would it corrupt the OS since the file system hasn't been developed naturally and i'm just kind of slapping it on?

 

In the PC-shop they used Norton Ghost for taking images and cloning hard drives. Works just fine for the OS as well (worked for XP anyway, but it's identical, I can't see how it would not work).

That said, if you don't have massive amounts of software installed, it might be faster to just reinstall the whole thing.

 

This

 

Acronis True Image is a popular HDD imager and backup manager. I think that since it's a completely new drive you'll probably have boot sector issues however. Since it's such a new setup I would definitely just start again like others have suggested.

 

You could go to seagate's site and download seagate disk wizard which is actually Acronis True image and is free and make a clone.

 

This is what I use. Truely superb and unnervingly fast!

 

Alright then.
I ask because driver installation was a pain. Especially the hybrid NVIDIA switching drivers.