I bought a Seagate 40GB Momentus 5400rpm drive to upgrade the 10GB Travelstar in my ThinkPad 600e. It's supposed to arrive tomorrow and I really don't want to spend all day manually installing Windows XP and all my apps.

I've cloned desktop hard drives before. That's easy since multiple IDE connections are available, but that's not an option on my laptop. I'm thinking I'd need two 2.5" hd adapters to plug both drives into my desktop, from which I could perform the cloning.

Does anyone have the hardware necessary to accomplish this task, or know of some alternative method of cloning a notebook drive?

I'm not entirely sure on the cloning process, but... firewire? USB 2.0?

This laptop has neither (well, USB 1.1). I have a 100mbps router/switch for fast file sharing between my two machines.

You could try using an image maker such as Norton Ghost. Take a snapshot of your harddrive, send it to your desktop, then send it back somehow. I'm not entirely sure how it works.

borrow a usb-> Laptop IDE cable. I've got one here you can use if you'd like. Once the cable's attached, just fire up whatever software you'd like to use to copy a partition and choose the right source-in linux this tends to show up as a scsi device, I've no idea why. Not certain about windows, but it should be pretty obvious