Im surprised your new 1.5tb drive did not come with a cd, each drive comes with a tools disk, wich is a self bootable disk that has drive cloning on. all you have to to is when booting, during toe POST test hit the del or esc key what ever it tells you to do, go into the cmos settings, and change the boot order of the machine, cd/dvd first then your primary hard drive. after that press f10 and save. next insert the cd/dvd in the drive.
If you did not get the support cd, go to the drive manufacturers website, and see if you can request it. a drive cloning cd is standard with any drive nowadays, with the exception of the usb drives, but I was at walmart yesterday and found a bin of 640 and 500gb drives in the hell clear packaging wich does include backup software.
If your computer is only a few years old, you should be able to select in cmos to boot from USB (if newer) CD/OPTICAL HARDDRIVE 1,2,3 in that order. So if you clone your drive, and have a few spair drives, you can also install your os on subequent drives so if your primary drive does not boot doe to a boot sector virus, your secondary drives will, then you can deal with coping your data.