XPS M1210 Drive cloning, any advice?

I've been doing battle with my XPS M1210 hard drive.
I recently purchased a 500GB replacement drive and used the
Apricorn EZ Gig II software to clone the drive to my new drive.

Unfortunately, this resulted in the new drive being "down sized" to the same size of the cloned drive.

After much pain, I found the only way to get the drive back to it's original size was to used the manufacturers software which will set it back to normal.

I tried Apricorn a few more times, no luck. I was able to get the drive to boot, but at the reduced size. If I tried to format available space to create another partition, this results in windows erroring and being unable to boot.

Turns out there are problems with the:

+ MBR
+ Hidden restore partitions
+ Media Direct partition

I tried gparted in an effort just to copy the main boot partition. So far no luck with this approach. Computer complains about the partion.

Has anyone identified a good and easy way to do this with minimal pain?
I did see a post discussing other cloning software, but I'd rather learn if a "perfected" method had been determined.

Regards,

Mike

 

your best bet would be Acronis bare metal restore.

http://www.acronis.com/backup-recovery/advanced-server/universal-restore.html

 

Thanks for the thought, but I was able to find a work around with Apricorn EZ Gig II.

Turns out the Dell drive has special partitions that can present a problem. The solution was to do an AS-IS clone. Then before booting the drive, use the Windows XP Recovery Console, via a CD boot.

Selecting the 'R' recovery option one needs to repair the MBR, master boot record, as well as run bootfix. To perform this operation successfully you'll need to know the drive administrator password.

Once this was done, I was able to boot normally and the entire drive capacity was recognized.

Regards,

Mike