Cloning/Imaging a drive

For years the industry standard was Norton Ghost which has myriad options to pull images and restore them. We used to ship whole racks of systems to our customers, and used Ghost extensively to re-image.

There are plenty of other alternatives, including free ones - one Google search for "drive cloning" will give you many pages to sift through.

If I was trying to migrate to a completely different system, however, like desktop to laptop or vice versa, I'd be more interested in starting with a clean install for the target system and using something like Beycond Compare over the network to quickly see what else I need.