Copy Dell HD partions

I am upgrading my primary (SATA) hard drive for a larger one. There's lots of generic information out there and programs to do this but I'm having a little issues I'm hopeing somebody can give me more specific information.

My current drive has the Dell factory install of 3 partions, as I understand it these are the Utility Partion (witch is FAT), drive partion (NTFS, with XP on it), and System Restore? Partion (?????). I want to copy all 3 to the new drive adding the extra space to the main partion. That System Restore one is messing me up, nothing will even attempt to copy it. All the help I find out there deal with removing it, not saving it. (Yes I like to have sys restore around, rarly use it but nice to know it's there just in case, that it backs up to a separate partion is a big plus to me as well)

I'm looking for somebody who has done exactly what I'm trying to do and can tell me what software they used to do it. I have partion magic 7 and Norton save and restore at my disposal but neither has done what I want, I'd buy another package but I want to be reasonably sure it'll work first. (magic wouldn't even try to copy the sys restore partion, and save and restore has never worked well for me, it locked up when I tried to boot from it's CD)

PS.
Both drives are SATA connected directly to the mother board (mine supports up to 4)
Yes, both drives are currently visible to the system (turned extra port on in BIOS)
I'm running XP pro SP2
I have bootable CD and floppy drives available
new drive is Western Digital, not sure what old one is, WD Data Lifeguard tools didn't work.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer me.

 

Partition Magic is HDD size dependant. By that I mean that a particular version of PM can only handle a HDD of so much size, beyond which copying corruption will occur. Example PM6 will only handle max HDD of about 60GB, PM8 Power Quest version 160GB and PM8 Norton version 320GB.

You do not say what size hard drive you are trying to copy to but I suspect that this maybe the issue. You could try this

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html

whch can be used free on the basis of just using in dos mode.

Good Luck

 

I have partion magic 7 (power quest) and I once used it to adjust a partion that was 1TB big so that's not the issue (the new drive is only 250GB) the 3rd partion just isn't a partion type PM knows.

UPDATE: After the 3rd attempt I finally got Norton Save and Restore to install properly. I used it to copy all 3 partions to the new drive and windows booted from it but I encoutered a few odd issues.

First: the system time keeps getting lost (reverts back to October of 04 or something) I know it's not the little battery that keeps it going after power down cuz I just replaced it a few months ago (after it had lasted 2 years), plus certion BIOS settings are stored in volitile memory and they would also be lost. Plus it's random, sometimes I unplug and it fine, sometime I just hit restart and the time is lost.

2nd: it worked fine for a few days then one day Norton anti-virus 2007 auto protect crashed, would crash again shortly after a reboot. I did an uninstall and reinstall of it with no luck. Tech support severely disappointed me. I also tried copying the drive partion from the original dirve again, this time I was able to use partion magic (cuz the sys restore partion had previously been coped) and it didn't resolve the issue.

Since then I just got sufficently frustrated that I went back to the original disk. Everything (norton and system clock) has been working fine for a few days now. I uninstalled a load of junk, deleted some old backups, and moved a few cashes to a separate drive. The end result being I now have about 80GB free (instead of the <10GB I had before) and everything is working. Maybe I'll try that program once my patience rebuild a little but for now I'm just going to make due with this.