Sorry for the length, but decided that it would be better to try to answer questions up front.
I have a Dell e1705 that shipped with Vista. My work software won't run under vista so I formatted and installed a slipstreamed XP PRO SP3. It took a while and a couple of attempts, but worked well. This was several years ago.
I would like to ghost (clone?) my drive to an external 350 gb usb drive. A couple of questions: If I do this, can I later move the ghost to a 250 gig upgrade for the same system, when the budget is not so tight? My problem is that I no longer have a lot of the software now installed on my Dell. (We had a fire which destroyed a lot and some are no longer available.) I would like to later be able to just swap hdds with no reinstallation at all. Can this be done? Also, when I formatted my drive, it left the media direct partition on it, but I wasn't aware of that at the time. Media Direct doesn't work, which is fine with me. (Thanks, Dell Support!) I did the research and found the workaround for the drive reporting the wrong size and can handle that.
And finally, if all that can be done, is there a step by step guide?
My specs are:
Dell 1705E
1 gig RAM
C drive: 100 gig
Hidden MD drive: 2 gig
TIA, Deejay