Changing HD on T23-- what are my options for Restore/recover

[Dngrsone]

As the subject indicates, I have a T23 type 2647-8MU and I have a 60GB drive I want to install in place of the 40GB drive I have there.

I currently have my 30GB drive broken down into several partitions-- Part 1 is an 7.5GB Windows XP Pro bootable, Part 2 is an extended part, and Part 3 is the 1GB recovery partition.

In the extended partition I have a 1GB Linux swap, 512MB Fat32 Scratchpad (to move files between OSes), a 12GB NTFS data partition, and 5GB Slackware partition.

I essentially want to double the partitions I am using now, since I have run out of room on my Win drive and the Slack drive needs more space to accommodate Xorg 7.1

Now, my issue/question is this-- do I rebuild the Recovery partition into the new drive, and if I do, how can I update it with SP2 and as many updates as I can?

I will be taking this machine on the road, and I'd like to be able to reinstall XP painlessly with a push of the button if the need arises, but having to plug in and wait for 30 hours to install SP2 and updates is annoying as all getout, so am I better off building an install disc or DVD instead? I have a pretty decent slipstream setup for my desktop, but I would obviously have to install all the special IBM drivers and crap for the laptop.

Thanks, guys. I have all kinds of questions regarding my Thinkpad, and I'm happy to have found such a resource as this forum.

[Kyocera]

I think you should be able to clone the drive to your newer bigger drive, click the HD Clone link in my sig and read through that. Acronis should be able to copy all the partitions and the HPA, definately keep the HPA or at least copy it to CD's if the t23 has that ability, i am not sure.

[Dngrsone]

Thanks, Kyocera. I don't want to clone the drive so much as build a new one and export the HPA to it. Are there any tutorials on updating the HPA with SP2, et al?

[Dngrsone]

Okay, I used an adapter to run the 2.5" drive on the Dngrlab computer and partitioned the drive using cfdisk from Slackware. I have a second adapter, so I can plug both old and new drives in at the same time to copy via Linux.

Here's my partition scheme so far--

P1-- 20GB (NTFS) Windows
P3-- 1GB (FAT32 hidden) HPA
P5-- 1GB (Linux swap)
P6-- 20GB (Linux) Slackware
P7-- 2GB (FAT32) /Scratchpad
P8-- 14GB (NTFS) Data

I had intended on keep the /Scratchpad at 512MB, but since I intend to upgrade my RAM to the full 1GB (from 512MB) in the (hopefully near) future, I thought I'd use 1024MB for Linux swap now and then change it to 2048MB and drop /Scratchpad down to 1GB when I do upgrade the memory. I think that makes sense...

So, the big question is-- can I just copy the contents of the old HPA partition to the new one to get functionality, or is there special stuff I have to do? I already have P3 set as bootable.