Hello. I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 Laptop and would like to upgrade the 40gb hard drive to something a little more beefy (160GB). I know how to take the old unit out and put the new one in but can anyone tell me how I get the OS and information from the current drive onto the new one......?
Thanks

If you have two adapters and a PC with cloning software then you could hook both drives to the PC (the current one as Primary slave and the new one as secondary Master) and clone.

Or you could contact Dell for perhaps easier options such as just reinstalling XP on the new drive. Did Dell supply you with an XP CD?

http://support.dell.com/

hmmmmm, sounds technical!!!!!

I do have access to a 250gb external drive, could I clone my existing 40gb onto this, change the hard drive and then drop everything back on to the new unit?

How would I get the new unit to boot up without any information or OS on it tho....?

You would need both drives on one computer to copy/clone.

The adapters are like this HERE.

With both drives connected to a PC you can use GParted to Copy the old to the new. You will need to first create a partition on the new drive the exact same size as the old drive. Then you will have the remaining space as a second partition on the new drive.

HERE is a good general guide to GParted and HERE is a post (although poorly written) that explains how to do it.

hello again. I now have a shiny new 120gb hard drive but it's still in the box it came in and not installed in my laptop. I was looking through some old software disks and found one that came with my external hard drive for Acronis True Image.
If I buy an external hard drive enclosure, install the new blank drive into it, will the Acronis software clone the hard drive to the new disk that I can just install into the laptop and boot up? or is it not that simple....?

Apparently you can:

When you use the "Disk Clone" tool, you effectively copy/move all of the contents of one hard disk drive onto another hard disk drive. This function allows you to transfer all the information (including the operating system and installed programs) from a small hard disk drive to a large one without having to reinstall and reconfigure all of your software. The migration takes minutes, not hours, but it is not generally used as a backup strategy.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing...sk-clone-tool/

I have never used that software so do not know the process but you should be able to find some info if needed.

You will need a hard drive enclosure that will accept a laptop drive or again will need an adapter. These are not standard IDE interfaces.