Least painful way to upgrade my hard drive if I don't want to use an image.

I want to upgrade my hard drive and DO NOT want to restore from an image–mostly because there is fifteen years worth of crap on my current image so I want to start completely fresh and copy over only what I currently need.
I bought the new drive. I have other drives with backup images on them.  I just downloaded DivXInstaller. Now that I have all of the parts I don't know what to do with them.
What's the least painful way to do this?

chenango232 wrote:
Missing a pretty big step here....  How does one install a new OS on an external drive?  You can't install an OS without first booting into an OS.  I don't have a disk to boot to, but have gotten as far as downloading the install software.  Perhaps the answer you should be providing is that I need to create an install disk somehow?
Is not the current HDD in your MBP a boot drive?  If so and you have Yosemite installed, you can boot into the recovery partition.  From the 4 option menu you can use Disk Utility.  If you have the NEW HDD connected to the MBP it will appear in Disk Utility.  Click on that drive to format in Disk Utility>Erase.  After formatting, go to the 'Reinstall OSX' option and install the OSX onto the external HDD.  When finished swap the drives.
Ciao

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