Replacing laptop hard drive

Thanks for your reply.

I tried using Clonezilla (with the new WD drive in my laptop and the old drive on USB enclosure), during which there was a problem cloning one of the drive’s partitions. After finishing, the laptop (with new drive) will only boot and go into startup repair, where I found that the “system” partition is corrupt.

My idea now is to create a windows 7 installation cd, format the new drive and install windows 7 on it. Then backup my personal files on the old drive and put them on the new one.

Anyone believe this will work, or have any better ideas?

Thanks