Originally Posted by
Loren Pechtel
My copy is a few years old. It's been a while since I've had to do such things.
A few years old Acronis will probably ruin alignment; avoid.
I generally use gparted from
systemrescuecd and recommend it for more technical folks; for somewhat technical folks, I recommend
http://www.clonezilla.org/
For non-technical folks, the best option I've found is to use the Windows 7 built in system image backup and then create a restore CD when it offers at the end, then restore back. The down side is that it requires a sufficiently-large separate external drive for the backup, and it doesn't work if you have additional non-windows partitions. It's pretty close to idiot proof, especially since you've never got both the source disk and the destination disk attached at once.