Seagate DiscWizard is a free software powered by Acronis that lets you quickly install a new hard disc drive, with wizards that guide you through the process of creating and formatting partitions.

DiscWizard migrates everything – Operating System, applications, documents and personal user settings – to the new disc drive just as you had them before using Acronis’s patented disk imaging (ghosting) technology. After you migrate, you can keep using your PC just like before.

DiscWizard lets you create image backups of all the data on your computer, entire discs or individual partitions. It allows you to create exact, sector-by-sector disc backups, including:

-Personal files, including music, videos, and digital photos
-Operating systems including Windows and Linux
-Custom application user settings such as Microsoft Office, iTunes, Windows Media Player, Instant Messengers, Web Browsers
-Outlook e-mails, contacts, calendar, tasks, notes, signatures, news folders, e-mail rules and user settings

Key features include:

-Perform live backups: Use your PC during backups
-Incremental and differential backups
-Exclude specific files
-Restore your entire PC from an image
-Restore specific files
-Restore application settings
-Explore archives: Easily search and recover particular files in archives just like in Windows Explorer
-Create backup archive rules
-PC cloning: Upgrade your PC without the need to reinstall the operating system and applications, or configure user settings
-Backup to FTP, Hard disk drives, Networked storage devices, CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, ZIP, Jaz or other removable media, USB 1.0 /2.0 drives, SCSI, IEEE1394 (Firewire) and other storage devices.

This is one of the best applications out there to backup, restore & transfer data between hard drives and computers.

Download Seagate DiscWizard here. If you have a Maxtor drive, download MaxBlast here