Please help with E1505!!

I am attempting to upgrade the standard 80 gb 5400rpm hard drive on my aging inspiron e1505 to an new hitachi 7k200 7200rpm 200 gb drive. I bought an external usb enclosure to put the new hard drive in so that I could clone the old one to it using free HDClone software. The clone started just fine and completed but then when I tried to put in the new drive and boot windows, things started fine, i got the windows loading screen and then, BSOD. i took the advice of the BSOD and removed the newly installed hard drive and put the old one back in and everything was back to normal. HOWEVER (this is where things get interesting):

once i had windows up and running on the old hard drive i plugged the new one into the usb port (using the external enclosure).it showed up as expected under my computer. when I clicked on it I was prompted by windows to format the drive. I figured, well why not the clone didn't work anyways so I formatted the drive. Then I discovered that the formatted partition was only 72.4 GB, exactly the same size as my old hard drive. HDClone is supposed to resize partitions to allow for extra space automatically. evidently this never happened. No real problem, i can use acronis disk director will solve this problem, but now I have a new problem:
after the format I restarted my computer and now every time I plug in the new hard drive (in the external enclosure) into a USB port, it shows up as a DVD drive. I cannot access it, and neither can acronis. So I cannot resize the partition to attempt another clone. I realize this is a complex problem, but I am at a loss to solve it. If anybody has any suggestions they would be gladly accepted. I really want to get this hard drive in before the weekend. Thanks in advance for reading my long sad post!

 

OK, I plugged the usb enclosure into another computer, and that solved my first problem. Now I have a more serious problem, compuapps swissknife and windows built-in disk manager both tell me that I have NO unallocated space on my brand new hard drive and that it's maximum capacity is 73.13 GB. PLEASE HELP!! the disk still will not show up under acronis disk director, but it may be a moot point because windows says that there is no more space to give. what have I done to my hard drive to make this happen? and more importantly is this reversible? I am getting desparate now for help from anyone who has more experience with hard disk managment than me.

 

OK, I am now one step farther, but am still stuck. I finally got the drive to show up in acronis disk director, and it too is unable to find more than 73.13 GB of space. It had 193 this afternoon when I started so I am thinking now that I have a bad disk. Im going to contact tigerdirect about an exchange in the morning. If anybody knows what the problem is here or how to fix it without having to replace the drive please speak up!

 

Well as of this afternoon I have solved my problem and I thought I would post the solution here in case anyone else ever has a similiar problem. I contaced Tigerdirect only to find out that they are unable to exchange or return hard drives that have rebates (which angered me quite a bit). They advised me to contact Hitachi about a replacement.

I called Hitachi this morning and explained what had happened. The woman (who sounded like she was probably in Pakistan or India) emailed me a link to download something called the "Hitachi Feature Tool." It was a bootable ISO which I burned to a CD because the e1505 has no floppy drive. I put the malfunctioning hitachi drive in the hard disk slot and booted from the CD. The tool started and, once again, told me that the capacity of the disk was 73.13 GB. However, because this tool came from Hitachi, it knew that the factory capacity of the drive was 200.25 Gb (note the lowercase), and it allowed me to change the maximum capacity to any number up to 200.25 Gb. There were also other options to change the way the cache is accessed and a few other things that I didn't understand, but long story short, I reset the maximum capacity using this magnificent "feature tool" from hitachi.