Problems cloning my Dell hard drive to a larger drive using Vista Ultimate

Hi i would really appreciate some help here. I have been trying for hours to try and work this problem out that i have been having but i have got nowhere.
First i tried to backup to some DVD's but that did not work so i went and bought an Sata HD enclosure.

I have a 160GB HD that i want to backup and clone to a 250GB HD.
I am using Vista Ultimate and i tried to backup with this but so far as i said i have got nowhere.

The Dell HD that i want to clone has a recovery partition on it that i want to keep and transfer over to my new HD. That is the whole point of me doing this.
The Dell drive as i said is a 160GB HD and it has four partitions on it and they are allocated as follows.
110MB healthy configuration /D:Recovery 10.00 NTFS/C-0S-136.44/2.50 Healthy partition.

I backed everything up to my new drive and when i run the Windows Vista PC backup after selecting it to format my HD and match the partitions i get this error-
There are too few disks on this computer or one of the disks is too small.
Add or change disks so they match the disks in the backup and try restore again.
(0x80042401)
Is there anything i can do about this? I have used Acronis in the past but i don't really understand that to well and i would prefer to stick with Vista Ultimate backup if i can and maybe another partition tool. Besides I downloaded Acronis before and I think that my 15 days trial is well and truly up.

I presume this is not working for me as i am trying to backup to a larger HD is there any way round this or am i just wasting my time. If this is possible how do I get the partitions on the larger drive to match my old drive?

Thanks

 

When you clone using Ultimates Complete PC, it transfers the disk exactly. So...if your hard drive is larger, it only formats and uses exactly what was copied to restore. This means you now have unallocated space left to create additional drives, after the restore is done.

To avoid this you can use the backup and restore function using Easy Transfer.

 

Flamenko thanks for the advice.
For some reason the Windows Easy Transfer did not work for me. I tried Ghost also and then removed it as it would not allow me to make an image of my HD and carry it over to my new drive.
I gave up in the end. I ending up installing Media Direct and creating two partitons. I just copied the recovery partiton over to my second partiton and changed the name over. I doubt that i can get it to work this way if i cannot i will just delete it.

 

Get the trial version of Acronis TrueImage 11. This includes a cloning option. It's probably best to make a bootable CD siince this pushes Vista to one side.

John

 

John thanks for the advice i tried Acronis before and i didn't get anywhere with it. If i could carry over the recovery partition and hack it and get it to work that would be ideal for me. I think that my 15 days trial has also run out quite some time ago now.

Edited to add:
I am going to have a go of using it again that is if they will allow me to install it.