Clone a laptop drive

What is the easiest way to make a bit-perfect copy of a potentially failing laptop hard drive? The copy target would be a new 2.5" drive that I'd then install in the same laptop.

I'd like to clone my laptop hard drive onto a replacement drive. The copy target would be a new laptop drive. Whatever mechanism I use to copy data would ideally a) not be derailed by bit errors (the current drive IS failing, after all) and b) be able to enumerate which files are corrupt, if any.

I'm running Windows XP, but would be willing to boot into a Linux CD distribution, etc... I'm a pretty sophisticated user, just not an I.T. guy with copies of Ghost lying around (and don't recommend Norton Ghost, please; it's over-complicated and I hate it).

for unix i used rsync (a standard tool). however, i don't know whether what you are describing will work for windows. see here - the suggestion to use dd instead makes sense.

I used Acronis True Image when my old laptop's hard drive was failing. I copied everything onto an external and it completely replicated on the hard drive of the new laptop. I don't think it will tell you what files, if any, are corrupt though.

Upon further research, they also have another product that looks like it might provide more support for migration of possibly corrupted file systems, MigrateEasy.