Moving hard drive information from one to another

Hello all, so I had an issue with my old hdd where it would give me a blank screen with just my mouse showing up so I had to get a new hdd. Any who, I was wondering if I could copy the entire hdd info from the old one and paste it to the new one minus the boot files and windows 7 files. However I heard that this will not work as the files are all saved to the registry as well. Anything I can do besides moving files one by one?
Thanks

If you are strictly talking about data files, you can copy and paste them to the new drive if you can access the old drive. It will take a while depending on how many mega/giga bytes you have stored and want to copy.

The whole HDD?

You can image it and copy the image to the new drive. That's what I've always planned on doing if I ever got an SSD.

Remove your large collections (of audio, video, pictures, etc, if your SSD is small (likely)) and then what's left on the drive will be programs and the OS, and then put the image on the SSD and bam.

You can use dd (with a liveCD like Knoppix) to copy the entire partition if the drives are the same size, or mount the old and new drives and copy the files. (For the latter, you must use a liveCD if the files you're copying might be accessed by the OS or you may get errors.)