clonezilla

[#1]

Has anyone any experience of using this app. I am swapping the hdd in the outlaws pc, as their hdd is nearly full (2gb remaining),out of their orig 40gb drive. I know I can just reinstall windows, and then restore the files, but would prefer to clone the drive. I have a spare 120gb ide drive for them...
Is the app easy enough to use. I did have a magazine cover disk with paragon drive copy, but its expired.
Would welcome any advice

[#2]

I use it all the time off a bootable usb stick.
I've never used it for HDD to HDD, I've cloned a HDD into an image then restored the image to another HDD or Virual machine.
Works very well but make sure you read all menus carefully  .......
The only issues I've ever had is if there are file system errors or unclean unmounted drives but a scandisk before doing a clone will make sure you don't have any issues.

[#3]

I've used it to clone drives before. As picbits said READ the menu's as they are full of different options.
You can clone it as is, expand the partitions, copy individual partitions etc, very detailed.

[#4]

I've never had any problems with it. 

[#5]

I tried it once but could not get it to work at all.  Since I own a copy of Acronis True Image, there wasn't any great incentive to persevere. 

[#6]

The problem with Windows is that (typically) the OS and user data is all intermingled.

[#7]

I appreciate that this isn't answering your question, but if you just need a one-time migration, consider the free version of Macrium Reflect.
I own a licence for the full version now, but prior to that I used the free version to migrate a Windows XP system to a newer hard drive (by backing up to a USB drive, and then restoring that image to the new disk).
You may be able to enlarge the 40GB partition to 120GB during the restore (I can't remember whether this is available in the free version), but if not, you should be able to use the built-in disk utilities in Windows to enlarge the partition afterwards.

[#8]

I have used free HDClone 4 to dump an entire XP Professional in an 8GIG drive to an IDE 160Gig drive with complete success. The paid-for version allows other options which may not be valuable if a straight swap is all that is required.

[#9]

Sorry for the late replys guys....
I appreciate your help, and yes, all I need is at the min, a 1 time migration.  I will have a look at the 2 other options, and have a think
Cheers

[#10]

Tried hdclone last night.. detected drives ok, but when i came back to it after an hour, it still sais over 2hrs to go, and out of the 18 or so million sectors, there were over 4millioj read errors. I am suspecting the hdd is goosed, maybe why its running slow. Note, i was using the version you run within windows, am i better creating a hoot disk to do this? Currently running an intensive chkdsk.