I've got a dell inspiron 640m. I want to put a bigger hard drive in it.
Is it just a matter of
1)image the existing drive to an external drive
2)take out hard disk
3)put in new hard disk
4)image it back on.
If so, what free software for full disk imaging does anyone recommend?
Also, can I use any 2.5" hard drive, or is there a particular type I need?
Joe
Just clean up the existing drive and buy a sexy external drive. Cheaper and a lot less hassle. :o)
Yes.
You'll need to match up the interface, modern drives are SATA and old ones are IDE. Other than that, should be fine.
Imaging, I use Acronis, but it's not free (though well worth the money). There's a Linux live-CD solution which is free, but I can't remember what it's called so I'll defer to someone else to field that question.
I put the new drive into a usb caddy, image onto it, swap drives, new drive works in the laptop old drive used as external drive. I used Norton Ghost but that's £££. Any drive as long as its SATA or IDE or whatever you have. Some are quicker, some are quieter, i went for the cheapest 
Clonezilla is a Linux distro dedicated to cloning drives - can clone drive directly or via an image. Any OS on almost any filesystem. Works well - http://www.clonezilla.org
Also Parted Magic for partitioning and resizing partitions on disks (if you don't want to use the whole of the new one as one single partition) - http://www.partedmagic.com
Both free, natch.
Colin
I had just this problem a couple of weeks ago with a Fuji Amilo. Old 40GB drive had died, took it out, SATA connections. Bought new 250GB drive, fitted it. Because the new one was SATA2 not SATA, and bigger than 120GB, the machine wouldn't work with it. Ended up getting a second-hand drive. There will be info on your Dell on a forum somewhere if you're going to have similar probs. On some machines a BIOS update will sort the drive size limit.
I'd suggest that the drive size was more likely to be the issue rather than any problem with SATA / SATA2. SATA is backward (and forward) compatible by design (or at least, it's supposed to be...!).
There's a known barrier at 137Gb for disk sizes, but personally I've never seen it be an issue on SATA disks - SATA is a newer technology that the 48-bit LBA required for larger disk support. Odd that you'd get SATA support but not 48-bit LBA, but I don't see eye to eye with Fuji for PC gear at the best of times so I can't say I'm wholly shocked.
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