I'm planning to upgrade my laptop hard drive to one with more disk space.  I've already purchased the new drive and have a copy of Ghost 10, which I'm hoping will do the trick.  Note that I've never done this type of thing before and it will be my first time using Ghost, but I feel pretty confident I can get it done -- just don't want to start down the road without having a clear understanding of all the steps.

At a high level, this is what I'm hoping can be done:
a) Using Ghost, make a full disk image of my existing drive and copy this image to a (separate) USB2.0 external drive.
b) Shut down, remove battery, etc. and remove the existing hard drive from laptop
c) Install new hard drive in laptop
d) Start computer, booting off of Ghost 10 CD, with external drive connected (I've already validated that Ghost 10 has the drivers to work with my external drive)
e) Recover image to new internal drive

Will this work?  What am I missing?  Do I need to change any of the BIOS settings?  Does it matter that the drives are not identical in size?

Here are a few relevant details about my system:
- WindowsXP SP3
- Ghost 10 installed
- 60 GB internal HD with single NTFS partition (C:)
- Upgrading to 120 GB internal HD (also wondering if there is an easy way to add a partition or two during this process, but perhaps I should take on one challenge at a time)

Thanks in advance for any help offered.

p.s. - if this information has already been posted somewhere, I apologize for the duplicate thread.  I have searched and haven't come across it yet.

John - Thank you for the guidance.  I think I'm almost ready to go.  I also found and read the following post, which agrees completely with your instructions: http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1139345103

I do have one follow-up question.  In attempting to verify that I have only one partition, I used both suggested methods: Windows Disk Management and the Norton Ghost "PartinNT.exe" utility.  Disk Management seems to confirm that the C:\ drive is my only partition.  However, the Ghost utility shows an additional un-named and unallocated space of only 7.8MB.  Is this a hidden partition?  Is it something I need to worry about?  (I've attached a screenshot of the Norton result.)

Thanks again for any additional insight.

I forgot about it but there is an option on the restore called:
Quote:


If you haven't already done the restore, try that.

You should also choose: Set drive active (for booting OS)

mikeg wrote on Jul 12^th, 2008 at 10:36am:


Did the new drive book into XP ok?  If so, then Ghost automatically set the drive to active, so you don't need to do anything else.  Did the Disk Management show the empy space?

If you want to try and let Ghost fill/expand the space, you can boot from the Ghost Recovery CD, go to the Utility options, and I think there are options there to delete partitions on your new 120 gb drive.  You could delete the partition, and then recover the backup again, and check the "expand the drive".  That would be an inexpensive way to do that.

Otherwise Norton Partition Magic 8.0 is the one I have used.  Create a boot cd and use that to expand the partition.  (FYI, Vista has an expand feature partition built in...nice touch.)

Congratulations.  Glad everything worked out first try!

After any major reconfiguration, it's a good idea to run
chkdsk c: /f
from the command prompt.  That makes sure all the disk pointers are set.

Don't forget to take regular Ghost 10 image backups to your external usb2 hard drive.  That way, if you have a hardware or software disaster, you have a fresh/current backup.

Good luck.