Laptop hard drive - backup, replace with larger, restore

[thesailor]

GOAL: get winXP on my older laptop that is running out of space migrated over to a larger hard drive.

1) I purchased a new eide drive for the laptop - 320GB Maxtor... laptop has a 120GB in it now and it's nearly full...

2) I purchased and used "Acronis True Image Home 2009" at the recomendation of a geek squad guy at Best Buy... prior I had used Norton Ghost - but my old license is expired... It installed fine. I then made a complete backup to an external 1TB hard drive (USB HDD).

I installed the new hardware and rebooted with the acronis - it restored the drive contents...

but... it only restored the 120MB drive.. I do not have use of the total drive...

I did not see anywhere to fdisk any of the partitions much less format it with ntfs... but the drive works in this restored state, again, with access to only the 120GB partition size...

Are there any tools that can modify an existing partition size on a new drive like this?

So I need to just reformat and try again with another piece of software?

Seems all my DOS days dont help much now - fdisk was not recognized, format was not even recognized when I booted from the XP Pro OEM disk...

I am missing something easy... what gives?

The systems works fine otherwise...

well.. thats not all true... probably should post this to another thread - but I was able to open MS Office products for a day - then all of a sudden the Microsoft Installer launches each time I open any office product like Outlook 2003 or Word 2003... it, of course fails and tries to restart the program again...

I tried several things I found in forums - I installed office resource kit, I downloaded all sorts of fixes... wipped the drive and restored from the backup again... same problem... I tried to do a system restore to earlier time - all end in failure no changes made - even the restore points from before I changed hard drives...

something's up and I cant figure it out... I need outlook and word... not sure what to do with that...

I also need the use of the extra hard drive space...

any ideas on either subject?

[abhishek]

Thread moved to Hardware Peripherals