dell inspiron hard disk to change - HPA found

Hi folks,
my Inspiron 6400 enjoyed his 2nd birthday. Everything fine so far but my 60 GB HD appeared to be too small now so I bought a new 250 GB samsung. As I do not like program installing nor data moving and things I decided to try hard disk cloning using acronis an elaborate disk handling program.
Shortly it did not work. It showed that my 60GB disk has an HPA (stands for host protected area and google tells you what that is) that cuts off the rest of the disk after 58 GB. Having done a clone my 250GB disk is now limited to 58 GB as well. The remaining disk space has disappeared. Finding a tool named hdat2 the tool shows me that disclosed disk space but cannot make it accessible again. Anybody here
a) knows how to get rid of an HPA?
b) knows how to migrate his dell system to a roomier HD?
Thanx for comments.

 

I don't know what an HPA is, but a partition management tool such as Partition Magic would allow you to resize the partition. Freeware tools exist, but I haven't kept up on them.

Windows' Disk Management tool should allow you to see the un-used space on the drive and create a new secondary partition there, should you chose to do that.

Edit: OK, I did a bit of Googling, and it looks like I misunderstood what is going on with this HPA thing.

This site explains it way better than I could.

What you'll need to do is unhide the HPA on the new hard drive(use this), then use the tool on the Goodells.net site to zero the LBA-3 on your original drive, then re-clone just to be safe. The HPA won't be applied to the new drive, but you'll lose Media Direct and have to re-install it, if that matters to you.