Hard Drive upgrade with Media Direct 3.3

I have Vostro1400 with Vista premium and I am planning to upgrade my hard drive from 120GB to 320GB. I have 3 partitions C: OS, D ata, E: Recovery and I think hidden Media Direct 3.3

I plan to do the following:
Make an image of the hard drive on the itself or an external USB drive. Get the new 320GB drive install it in a USB enclosure and restorre this image into the 320GB HD. Once done put the new 320GB that now has the image into my laptop. I thonk I may have to use Vista or some other program to extend the partitions to get the full HD capacity as my HD will only have 120GB because of the image.

Looks straight forward but I have read a few places that Media direct may pose some issues. It may lock my drive into its 120GB size and I amay not be able to fix it.
Those who have successfully upgraded HD and still have MD 3.3 intact please post how they did it. I would like to keep MD 3.3 or 4 if I can get it the way it is now.

 

I had only one partition when I did my upgrade. I installed the media direct cd, it took a small partition of it's own, installed vista and haven't had problems. I don't know if that is helpful since I didn't use a clone. From what I have gathered, you will have problems if media direct isn't installed before the OS.

 

So I should install the MD 3.3 using the MD 3.3 installation disk and then install the image of my old hard drive?

Has anyone tried and if that will work?

 

From the research I did on media direct when upgrading my HDD, that would be how I would approach it. I know for a fact if Media Direct is not installed on the HDD before the OS it will not work properly.

 

So I cannot image my old hard drive onto the new one? and have to reinstall OS after the MD3.3?
I thought this applied to MD 2 and not 3 onwards?

Anyone successfull in doing an image and still keep the MD3.3 functionality intact? Here is how my hard drive partitions look

 

anyone has any clue or feedback?