Copying an hard drive's content to another hard drive

[Spotted]

So my father recently bought himself a new laptop and he needs the files from his old laptop to his new,hard drive swapping is out of the question for him,so what's the best method to copy a hard drive's content to another one?

Also yes it's between two windows systems and i do have an external hdd that i can use.

[stewi1014]

Do you want to do a file-level copy, filesystem-level copy, or drive-level copy?

 

It sounds like you just want files, and don't want to preserve the operating system or file-system. I certainly can't recommend preserving the OS.

If you have an external HDD, then can't you just copy the files from the old to the external hdd, then to the new computer?

 

I'm not sure where you are, but alternatively the US Newegg site has loads of harddrive readers here that would let you access the old drive once removed.

You could also try copy them over the network, but it seems like this is a very straightforward problem if you've already got an external HDD.