My dad was a do-it-yourself kind of guy. I spent a lot of time with him working on house projects. Furnace giving you problems? Take it apart. Electric work not up to code? Roll-up your sleeves (and put on rubber boots). I remember once we working on a project and everything was going right. It all came together in a few hours with only one trip to the hardware store. As we were sitting on the porch after the project he said “99 more.” Huh? “one out of every one hundred house projects goes that smoothly. 99 more before that happens again.”

I just had my one in one hundred tech victory (99 more). I was running out of space on my work laptop hard drive. I ordered a new larger drive and after 2 failed attempts by IT to clone it I had to take my laptop back because I was suffering from severe withdrawal. Today with 30 minutes of work and 30 minutes of waiting I cloned the 40GB drive to an 80GB drive. Sweet!

Here were the steps:

1. Buy a hard drive enclosure that basically makes the new drive into a USB drive [1].
2. Buy and download MigrateEasy
3. Create a boot CD
4. Boot to the CD
5. Answer some questions
6. Wait 30 minutes while it cloned the drive
7. Swap drives

Easy, peasy. 99 more.

[1] Actually I stole it from Josh while he was in MV and shipped him a new one at home. If you need it, Josh probably has it.