Since it's a Dell.....

I bought a Hitachi 120GB hard drive for my laptop, put it in a USB hard drive enclosure, cloned it with Seagate DiskWizard (SDW- made by Acronis). Transfered the new drive into my laptop and booted to a blue screen.

Is that the proper procedure, or do I need a bootable CD 1st?

Also, somehow rather than giving me the extra space that SDW clearly showed during the process, according to another post I read Dell's Media Direct made it into a copy of my original drive. 60GB's rather than 120GB's

Is there a program I can use with the new drive in the USB enclosure (F drive) to get the space back?

I'm thinking if I can get the missing space back, I'd do a clean reinstall of XP on my original drive eliminating Media Direct and clone again.

Here's another thread that gives a little more detail.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=200976

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No bites huh? OK, I have another question.

I really don't care if I have Media Direct or Dell Restore (if it's even on my machine), (I'd prefer to re-coup that space) if I install XP using the disk Dell provided, to the new 120 GB HD will I be able to restore this (old) HD as is, including current drivers, using Windows back-up utility backing up C, to a WD Passport?

Would I need to do any updates etc.?

Also, if things go wrong, would I be able to take out the new drive and put the old HD back in and have it working?

 

It might be better to boot from a boot CD with the formatting programs you need on it rather than having the drive you're working on in an external USB enclosure.

Maybe you could start over using gparted. That seems to be what most people in here are using to set the formatting of their hard drives. It works and it's free. There is a link for a LiveCD you can get at
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
You'd burn the iso to a CDR and then boot off of the CDR.

You say you're using a limited version of Acronis. Acronis also makes a "Disk Migration" tool that, according to the description, "Resizes transferred partitions to match new hard disk size."
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/migrateeasy/
It does have a free trial, though I don't know if it's "limited" or not.

 

The machine is looking for the old drive, not the new one to boot the OS, and swapping any 'important' parts like that on a machine in hope that it'll boot from the same hard drive state as before is a pretty strong order. It should have just installed the drivers and all been good, problem is it's not able to get that far. The boot loader is looking for that old drive and all it can find is this new hard drive so it throws it arms up in the air and says "to hell with this".

Unless you expanded all the partitions - duplicating a hard drive bit for bit will be exactly the same regardless if ones bigger or not. The partitions will be EXACTLY the same size and everything. You'll have to manually size them to the extra space.

Get rid of the restore partitions i's useless. Unless you plan to restore to the same OS as your system shipped with - bloat-ware and all. The media direct is up to you to get rid of or not. You can reinstall it though.