Best way to upgrade to new drive?

What is the best way to upgrade the hard drive on a Macbook? I mean to ask, what is the best way to transfer the complete system onto a new hard drive?
Thanks!
Captain!

# Buy the desired new 2.5" drive. If buying a 500GB unit, the Samsung SpinPoint fits inside, the Hitachi doesn't, the Fujitsu is too slow.
# Buy an external Firewire case for the drive. Install the new drive in it (this is temporary).
# Power up and plug in the new drive to the Mac. Make sure the system sees the new drive.
# Using Disk Utility, reformat the drive to a single partition, using a GUID partition scheme and in HFS+ format. Most new drives come in FAT32 or NTFS format. Search in the forums how to get rid of the NTFS format.
# Using SuperDuper, Carbon Copy Cloner or even plain old Disk Utility, clone your startup volume (internal drive) onto the external.
# Reboot and start up from the external (press Option before startup sound). Verify that everything works.
# Shut everything down, take new drive out of case, exchange with internal drive. Do it yourself or pay qualified technician to do so. Old style MacBooks are relatively easy, MacBook Pro's are more complex, Oct'08 portables are a piece of cake.
# Start portable, verify everything works. If so, put old drive in external case and use as a backup device. Else put it back in so you'll have a working computer while you figure out what went wrong.
# Enjoy...
Note: Since the Nov'07 release of the Mac portables, they have the Apple Hardware Test available as a hidden partition in the HDD, meaning that you can test your Mac without requiring the original Install Disk #1. If you change the internal HDD, you will lose that functionality, since no one has figured out how to copy the thing over to the new drive. This means you will need your Install Disk #1 to test your hardware from that point on.

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