It's easy to install a new hard drive in your desktop computer, but laptops can be a whole other ball of wax, because the drive is usually wedged deep into the notebook's innards and it takes a lot more elbow grease to swap out. MacBook owner Dwight Silverman took the plunge when he filled up his drive and doubled his available gigabytage. This process varies from notebook to notebook, so if you've successfully installed a bigger hard drive in your laptop, tell us how it went in the comments.

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Windows only All platforms: Free boot CD EASEUS Disk Copy copies any disk or partition sector-by-sector for an exact copy of the original. Disk Copy is a perfect tool for upgrading your operating system to a new, larger hard drive, or just making a quick clone of a drive full of files. With support for virtually any drive type or file system and an easy-to-use interface, this app is a fast, effective tool for quick drive copying. I haven't cloned a full drive with it, but according to reader Jason, it copies files significantly faster than previously mentioned HDClone. On the flip side, if you're looking to hot image your hard drive continuously, check out how to do that with DriveImage XML. Disk Copy is freeware, works anywhere you can boot from a CD. Thanks Jason!

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Windows only: Disk utility FosiX Lite is a visual hard disk analyser in the vein of previously covered WinStatDir and JDiskReport. What sets FosiX apart is the interactivity of the bar charts and pie graphs it produces. Run the application and see that you have two directories at the root level taking up a huge amount of space? Click on one and you're immediately inside the directory looking at new graph showing how space is distributed in that directory. FosiX lets you quickly see and drill down through large directories to get a sense of how your data is stored and the amount of space it is taking up. FosiX Lite is a free download for Windows only.

Mac OS X only: Free-for-now boot CD CampTune resizes your Boot Camp partition when the size of the Windows installation on your dual-booting Mac bumps against its limits. Without a tool like CampTune, you'd need to entirely reinstall Windows if you wanted to fiddle with the partition size of your secondary OS, making this a very handy app if you've underestimated how much space you need for Windows. CampTune is currently free to use, but their web site indicates it'll cost once it leaves pre-release, so grab it while it's hot. I haven't resized my Boot Camp with this, so if you give it a try, let's hear how it worked for you in the comments. Before you do, though, you may want to back up your BC partition with previously mentioned WinClone.

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Windows only: EASEUS Partition Manager is a hard drive partition utility that bills itself as a free alternative to the popular commercial product, PartitionMagic. EASEUS can resize and move partitions without losing data already on them (unlike many other partitioning tools which erase the data on the drive in order to work). EASEUS can also change partition labels, format easily, hide and un-hide partitions, preview the effect of your changes before you make them, and change cluster size. EASEUS only supports hard disks from 20-800GB (with apologies to those in the terabyte club). For more on partitioning with GParted (also free, but not as user-friendly), see our previous post on drive partitioning and imaging. EASEUS Home Edition is a free download for personal use on Windows XP and 2000 SP4 only.

Windows only: Free utility HDDScan diagnoses whatever ails your hard drive. HDDScan works on ATA, SATA, and SCSI drives and (with some limitations) on removable drives such as USB and FireWire. Analyse drive temperatures, conduct S.M.A.R.T. tests, export and print reports to document changes in your hard drive's health with HDDScan, which is a free download for Windows only.

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Windows only: Free, open source application HFSExplorer reads and extracts files from drives formatted with the HFS+ file system native to Macs. Common uses for HFSExplorer include reading files from your Mac file system from Windows running in Boot Camp or—something I've used it for—grabbing music in Windows from a Mac-formatted iPod. HFSExplorer is free, Windows only, requires Java. For help setting it up, check out Simple Help's guide.

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Free, open-source boot disk utility Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) automatically and completely deletes the content of every hard disk it can find on your computer when you run it. Sure you can fire up DBAN for emergency system wipes next time the feds come knocking on your door, but it's also a useful tool for protecting yourself from identity theft when you're prepping your computer for recycling or sale. The bootable DBAN can run from CDs, DVDs, thumb drives, and floppy disks. If you're just looking to securely delete single files and folders (as opposed to entire drives), check out previously mentioned Wipe File.

Windows only: Free utility CrystalDiskInfo keeps tabs on your hard drive health, including temperature, S.M.A.R.T. disk reporting, and the number of power cycles and run time on each disk. Although there is no silver bullet that can predict hard drive failure, if you're paranoid about your data you might factor in how many hours a disk has been running to determine it's replacement schedule. Knowing that one of your disks has had two solid years of uptime (like my primary operating system disk has) might encourage you to rotate it into retirement after that. CrystalDiskInfo is a free download for Windows only.

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Windows only: Ariolic Disk Scanner scans your hard disks, flash drives, CDs and other removable media for errors—but it doesn't fix them if it finds them. Completely portable and lightweight, Ariolic makes quick work of locating disk errors via read-only scanning, which is perfect for performing a quick disk check if IT lockdown or other circumstances render Windows built-in Scan Disk unavailable. Ariolic Disk Scanner is a free download for Windows only.

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