Hard disk Clone

You can use a 500G drive, but you CANNOT clone the existing drive.  For the reasons, see

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.htm

You can repair a truncated disc, as described at the end here:

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/hpa-issues.htm

Your best bet:  contact Dell for the Media Direct and Windows CDs and do a clean, ground-up installation.  While you CAN clone the operating system partition, doing so means manually writing a boot sector - and you cannot clone the Media Direct partition or the master boot record.

Thank you very much ejn63.

Your answer fully answered my question.      My only problem is, am I stuck with 100GB for the rest of time, what would be the best way to take all of my programs and put them on a new disk,  there are a lot. Files are not to much of a problem I could just transfer them over using an external drive I already know that the laptop sees the 500GB drive. The more I think of how to do this the more complicated it seems to become Reinstalling the Operating system again etc etc.

For any one else that is reading this post that may have this kind of problem the URL that ejn63 gave me  points to quite a long explanation of this problem, I have pasted the bit that explains why a clone will not work below

Beware: HPA Problems When Upgrading Hard Disk

Some people will eventually want to upgrade their hard disk to a new disk with larger capacity. Users should be warned about a unique problem that may occur in certain circumstances. If you try to replace your hard disk with a larger disk, if you try to clone the contents of your original disk to the new disk, and if your original disk contains HPA-based MediaDirect, then you may discover your new disk's capacity becomes truncated to the size of the original disk.

For example, say you wish to replace your 60 GB disk with a new 120 GB disk. To avoid reinstalling everything, you decide to use something like Acronis True Image or Symantec Ghost to clone the contents of the 60 GB disk to the 120 GB disk. When you try to boot the new disk, however, it blue-screens or fails to boot, and a check of the BIOS settings shows the BIOS thinks your new disk is around the same size as the old disk! No amount of recloning, reformatting, repartitioning, or rejumpering will get the BIOS to recognise the full size of the disk.

This section describes this phenomenon.

Thanks once again ejn63  for your follow up post. I will do as you suggest and contact Dell for the Media Direct and Windows CDs.

I will let you know how I get on .

Just for anybody coming along trying to sort out a similar problem,  you can clone and resize these quite easily whilst still keeping the Media Direct 2 partition functionality - I've just done one on an Inspiron 6400 upgrading from 60gb to 120gb on ssd.   You can't beat Dan Goodell's site www.goodells.net/dellrestore for a guide to understanding the mbr and restore/md workings - reading it enhanced my knowledge enormously and saved me a lot of time,  thank you very much Dan - but if you do want to keep the whole thing then it can be managed with just a few free tools.  Basically - boot from MD button, force power off, unhide hpa if needed, sector-by-sector copy drive, move md partition with partition magic, copy partition 4 entry from mbr sector 0 to same place in sector 3.  Move partition3 (recovery partition) with partition magic up against new MD location, move/expand partition2 (standard windows partition) with partition magic.  

If you've had a failed attempt before then you may need to remove the HPA from the target drive (hdat2) before you start sector-by-sector copy.