First, are you sure you have two separate drives and not one drive with two partitions? It isn't a typical configuration to have two separate physical disks in a laptop.
Yes, I have actually seen the 2. I have 3 drives. The 1st is the Windows drive, the 2nd is where the HP recovery software is on (which is a ppartition of the 1st drive), the 3rd is actually a second drive in the computer.
If it's just a single drive (or a dual disk configuration) and it is SATA you can plug the new and old drives into another system and use a program like Ghost (they offer a 30 day free trial) to image one to the other. I buy 6-10 new laptops at a time when replacing out field laptops and we have a disk with a standard image that we put on each laptop instead of configuring each one.
OK, so considering what you said, I can take, say, the second hard drive I have out of the laptop and place the new drive in that slot and make a Ghost image of the main drive (which hopefully includes both partition) onto the new drive (even though the drive size will be larger - from 160 GB to 500 GB - and faster) and then remove both drive and place the new drive with the Ghost image in the first slot and "should" work just fine (more or less)?
I know there are other ways to transfer disk to disk but my experience is that if you are trying to image from the disk you are working off of, you have more issues because Windows just doesn't like it.
OK, I think I understand what you mean. Perhaps I can use my wife's laptop which is a slightly older modle of mine to create the image of my main drive then transfer the image to the new drive by replacing the drives after the Ghost images is created.
