Upgrading hard disk on Dell inspiron 1520 running Vista

I am replacing the installed Seagate Momentus 160 gb 5400 SATA disk with a Seagate Momentus 320gb 7200rpm SATA hard disk as I need the extra space to hold my growing itunes collection and feel the extra speed would also be welcome.

I have the original Dell installation disks (Operating System, drivers etc), the installation disks for the subsequently installed software (other than the freebies including iTunes etc available on the net) and have backed up all my critical data to an external hard drive using the vista backup facility for subsequent restoration once all the software has been installed. I will of course keep the 160 gb drive available with all it's data intact as a secondary safeguard until I have satisfactorily completed the installation and testing of the new disk.

My question is will the Dell installation disks automatically recreate the presumably desirable DEll (disk D) restore facilty or will I have to lose this? Also beyond ensuring that the bios boot sequence looks first to the dvd drive containing the Dell operating system disk and following the sequences therein required is there anything else I need to know?

 

Once you use the Dell restore DVD the restore partition, D:, will be gone. It's a fairly simple process once you are booted into the Vista install.

 

The Dell disks will not recreate the Dell Restore partition on the new drive. You may be able to use a tool such as Norton Ghost (not sure of any good free alternatives) to move it over (just copying it over probably won't work since you need to be able to access it without the OS working for it to do any good). I haven't tried this myself.

I don't think it's worth spending any money on getting the recovery partitions, though. Since you have the Vista DVD, you can always install from that if necessary. System Restore should be enough unless you have a tendency to corrupt Windows installs - I'm guessing you don't since you haven't yet had to test how desirable the recovery partition actually is. And if you want an extra safeguard, an alternative is leaving an extra 15 GB or so partition at the end of the drive to install Vista to again if your current Vista install becomes corrupted beyond repair. In that case you'd just install Vista on the second partition and be able to access and back up all the files on your primary partition - after they're backed up, you're ready to reformat and reinstall again on the primary partition. Since you're using a Dell OEM version of Vista, you won't have any trouble installing Vista twice on the same machine. I've done this myself with Dell OEM XP and it worked quite well.

Someone else will have to attest to how useful Dell recovery partitions are - I don't know anyone who's actually tried to use one. But back in 2003 when my dad tried to use the HP Recovery Partition after buying a new HP computer and running into Windows bootup problems when setting it up, the recovery partition didn't help at all and HP had to ship Windows CD's to solve the problem. So I'm rather skeptical as to how useful the Dell recovery partition would be - hence why I've deleted the one on my 160 GB hard drive in favor of extra usable space.

 

There is a list of Disk Cloning software and comparison of features at the following link- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_disk_cloning_software