Well this was more than a simple task with many lessons painfully learned. Hopefully this will help someone out there to not have to learn them also. So the goal was pretty simple I had a 60Gb hard drive pretty full and wanted to upgrade to a larger one. The Dell was three years old and I now know was running Media Center 2. There are plenty of blogs and sites out there that now reference the issue with just cloning the hard drive, unfortunately I didn't see them till I had truncated my 320 Gb drive to 60Gb. If you have done this already the tool to fix it is here just make sure you are running it on a 32bit processor and yes you will need to plug it into a desktop since it can't work over usb. (At least at this writing).
Okay so here is how I finally was successful, may be other ways but this is what I did.
Assuming you purchased your new drive, you have an external drive casing so you can connect your disk via usb and that you have the Dell media CD to reinstall the OS. If this is not the case go out to Dell.com I believe you can order them.
1. Pull out old drive and put in new one, this is just a few screws, but Dell.com support can help you if you are not familiar.
2. Put in CD and boot to install OS.
3. Partition new drive:
I made two partitions, c: = partition 250Gb d:= 65GB. format ntfs quick
4. Install OS.
5. Once installed I didn't bother with the drivers, just the base OS.
I put the old drive in the external casing and connected via usb. Fire up cloning software. (Acronis Home Image, Clonezilla, Partition Magic, etc; I was using seagate drives so I used disk wizard from seagate which is a limited version of Acronis Home Image)
Create a partition image of the old c:\ drive and place it in the new d:\drive space. ( Here we are assuming that your old drive partition image will fit in the d:\drive. If not you would probably need a third drive to do it this way. Also note your old drive will have several detected partitions, the largest was your old c:\drive it will have a different drive label now obviously)
6. Using your cloning software Restore from image the newly created partition image to your new hard drive c:\ partition.
7. Reboot and done.
Other notes: if you have space to defragement the drive before hand it is recommended on some blogs.
Hope this helps.
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