AvoK95 wroteI'v been trying to do that for months! Thanks a lot , but can you please provide me with a link that teaches you this ? Because I really need this and I need to understand it a lot better.
I did not go too much into details because last time I did this was about 4 years ago, and with Windows XP. Basically the procedure I followed was like that:
1 - Install everything on your master system
2 - Run sysprep and it shuts down
3 - Plug the new hard drive into the computer, preferably through SATA
4 - Insert a Linux boot disk (Ubuntu) and boot the computer on that
5 - Copy the Windows partition to the new disk, here it gets a little complicated. I used dd to copy the partition, with a bit of tinkering the parameters (like block size) I could get a good performance. They there are a couple of other command line utilities that can be used to resize the NTFS partition. But the simpler way is probably to use the GUI partition manager in Linux, GParted. Things might have changed now since the partitioning format on disks is being changed to GPT (GUID Partition Table).
6 - Install disk on target computer, and start it up for testing. A long time ago when disk could still be either IDE or SATA, the system would sometimes not start and I would go into BIOS and change "SATA mode" to "Legacy" to fix that.
Sysprep is a tool that can be freely downloaded from microsoft. What it does is it puts the system back in a state similar to what it is during the first run on the computer, after a fresh install. When booted up again, the system will probe hardware, register all hardware, etc. then ask for user information, then even show the little windows welcome movie. It also changes an ID that is stored inside the computer and used on Microsoft domain. Without sysprep, two cloned computers cannot be on the same Microsoft domain.
If you do not use sysprep, and clone the system in it's normal state instead, then the system will be expecting to find it's regular hardware and find different hardware instead. It can work sometimes, but I'm sure it can fail too.
With Vista and Windows 7, things might have gotten a little more complicated, because Microsoft inserted additional copy protection. I'm not sure though, I might very well be wrong.
How is it going so far? Let me know.