What operating system are you using? According to the manual linked below this program is good for W98 through XP. It even suggests it needs VGA with Vesa - good grief Vesa was almost outdated when Noah left the Ark it seems. Check out this link. The thread is about external drives and there are links to free image creating software. Here is a link that might be useful: PC Clone EX Lite manual

Hard drive manufacturer you bought the larger drive from will have some kind of disk clone program. Sometimes you need to spend way too much time poking around in their support or downloads webpages to actually find the right one. Or you could also use windows built in System Image and at least get windows installed on it.. Then copy over the other partitions after you make some. This post was edited by mikie on Sun, Aug 10, 14 at 0:10

There's a similar package from Apricorn (I've seen it on Newegg) that also includes a drive image program that will transfer the OS and boot sector to the new drive and resize the partition for you.

Do you need to copy and paste things on the external HD? I shouldn't think so. Apart from the automatic backing up we have it set to do, if there is any individual file or folder we want to put on it, we simply left click on the file's or folder's icon and drag it to the icon for the external HD and it gets copied there. We installed the entire Oxford English Dictionary program on my husband's computer's external HD and it works fine, but a couple of other programs just wouldn't run right when we tried to install them on it. Come to think of it, the OED has a verification process by which you have to show the computer that you actually possess the CDs for it, and that may be why the company doesn't mind which drive you keep it on. We haven't tried downloading any programs to the ext. HD yet, but it seems likely to me that many--especially the expensive programs that don't provide for periodically proving that you have the CDs--will very likely not run well from there. However, from what Cboy writes, with the help of Acronis, it looks like you can backup the whole of your internal HD, which would include programs. So, being new to external HDs myself (a 500GB Maxtor One Touch 4), I'd like to ask Cboy if you can actually remove programs from C:\ (to save space) and then run them from the external drive instead, or if what Acronis does is only to save them so you can reinstall them in C:\ after a disaster and run them from there.