What's involved to clone Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop

I am going to upgrade my Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop hard drive from 100GB to 500GB. I have Acronis which I plan to use to do the job, which as far as I can see involves cloning the 100 GB drive and putting it onto the 500 GB drive.

But I don't think it can be as simple as that.

Do I have to alter the Bios to take into account the size of the new drive before I boot it.

When I look at what the excising hard drive contains using Partition Magic
there are 4 sections
Status
DELLUTILITY(*) Fat 78.4MB None Primary
Local disc (C) NTFS 90.797.1MB Active Primary
Local Disk(*) CP/M.Conc 3.074.9 None Primary
(*) unallocated 7.8 None Primary

My next question is will Acronis configure my new drive with the same types of file system i.e. Fat NTFS CP/M.Conc, Some of these look like files that might be needed to recover machine configuration in cases of failure.

Is there anything else that I need to do to make a success of the clone

 

I've never done it myself but it is possible to do it.
My friend has used Acronis and he says it will do the job for you (very easily). I think this page http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/features-cloning.html also suggests that Acronis will recreate your partitions but i'm not sure wether the file system will be the same.

Oh, and your system should auto-detect your new hard disk but if not you will need to configure it in the BIOS