Q: Hello. After reading Mike Dowler's article "Cloning WindowsXP", I decided to upgrade my existing 160Gb 2mb buffer HD to a 200Gb 8mb HD. I plan to make an exact copy of my 160Gb Windows XP SP2 drive and copy it to my new 200Gb drive... then reformat my 160Gb drive and use it for video storage (both are internal drives). However, before I proceed, I have two questions for Mr. Dowler: (1) I may have missed this in your article, but do I need to partition and format the new blank hard disk BEFORE I clone it? Before I ask my 2nd question, some more information for you: my 160Gb disk has 2 partitions (C and D). The D partition contains my application recovery. Question(2): What happens to the new extra 40Gb of storage? I assume my new drive will contain the original C (146GB) and D (10GB). I'd like the extra 40Gb to be available of the C partition (so I'll have ~190Gb on C... and ~10Gb on D). How do I do this? Thanks so much.

A: You didn’t mention which cloning program you were planning to use, but for your needs, Norton Ghost would probably be the best bet. You do not need to partition or format the new disk, just have it installed correctly into your system and ensure that it is detected properly by using the storage manager window. As for your second question, Ghost will add the remaining space on the disk automatically when cloning a single partition, and there are command line options that will allow you to specify how this extra space is used in a multi-partition clone too. I believe the correct syntax would be:

ghost.exe -clone,mode=copy,src=1,dst=2,sze2=F

If you are going to use one of the freeware programs in the article, you can use software like Partition Magic to add the remaining space into one of the two partitions after you clone the drive.