There are partition size limits, and your new drive exceeds these limits for some formats.

Did you first format the drive? Your earlier drives may have be pre-formatted. If the new 160 GB drive has been formatted as one partition, it is either formmated as a NTFS drive or used special extentions for a FAT32 drive. You will loose this special formatting if you format the drive again as a FAT32 system. Refer to instructions that came with the drive.

If the drive has not been formatted, then you can not write to it until it is formatted.

NTFS or FAT32 ?

NTFS provides greater partitions and more reliable disk operation. NTFS uses log files to keep track of all disk activity. Win XP can use this journal to repair files after a system crash.

Windows 95, 98, ME can not recognize NTFS volumes. You need a FAT32 volume as the boot volume for these operating systems. This restriction does not apply to files on a network. The boot record must be on a FAT32 partition for these earlier Windows sytems.

On partitions greater than 8 GB, NTFS manages the space more efficiently than FAT32.

The maximum partition size for a FAT32 drive created by Widows XP is 32 GB; A single NTFS volume can be up to 16 terabytes (16,384 GB) using default settings.

The Fdisk utility in Windows 98/ME can make a partition greater than 32 GB on a FAT32 disk. Use a bootup disk from one of these two systems to do this. After formatting the extra large partition, Win XP can use it.

The main reason for using FAT32 is compatiblity to the older system and/or software. If you are constructing a multi-boot system and one of these sytems is the older Windows system, the FAT32 system is needed for the older version of Windows.

If you have only Windows XP or Vista, I recommend NTFS.

Its a good idea to scan a new disk for bad sectors before using. Presumably, the manufacturer has already scanned and marked off the bad sectors, but I did have one 80 GB external disk where this had not been done. It gave me trouble until a complete scan was performed. A few bad sectors were found and marked off. After that, the disk performed flawlessly.

So first, format the disk and then scan for bad sectors. This will take some time for a 160 GB disk, but it well worth the effort.

If the disk is already formatted and is what you want, scan it before using.

With a disk of 160 MB, I suggest that you break this into 2 partitions of approximately 80 GB each. The partitions will not be quite as large as 80 GB because part of the space is used for file management and directories. Put the operating system on the first partition and use the second for data.

The next question:

Do you at any time have two hard drives connected to the computer? If so, the hard drive with the operating system must have its jumper set to "master" and the other disk to "slave" (assuming that both drives are connected to the same cable). While setting up a new drive using the existing computer, you may find it necessary to switch the jumpers a few times depending on the job at hand.

Hopefully, your computer's BIOS is capable of auto-recognizing the hard drives and can make settings accordingly, else this has to be done manually.

Please let us know if any of this information was useful.

Opps! You have a laptop. I forgot that detail while I was writing my reply. My comments regarding dual drives do not apply for laptops. I have been tweakng my desktop and have had as many as 3 drives running, and forgot that the laptop accepts only one drive.

I'm using NTFS (Windows XP) and can see the files on the drive if I put it in an enclosure and look at it with explorer. It's just not being recognized as a boot disk.

I have a Windows recovery CD for a different laptop, but it's also a different Windows version (and different drivers etc) so I can't really do a clean install, but I should be able to get it to work with FIXMBR and/or FIXBOOT, I would think.

I can try installing Linux and using lilo to manage the boot, but if I can install lilo without Linux, that would use less space.

I tried installing Linux and when I rebooted, I got a grub error 18. A trip to Google showed me that Error 18 can be caused by several things. One of the possibilities mentioned was having an older PC with a BIOS that doesn't recognize the full drive size. I booted and went into the BIOS. The drive size reported there is 137 gig. Converting the drive mfg definition of gig (using base 10) to the PC definition (base 2), I came up with about 149 gig. I put the drive in an enclosure and checked it on a newer laptop and it shows up there as 149.05 total.

I downloaded the latest BIOS from DELL, but that was still from 2005 (maybe it's time to get a new laptop?) and still didn't recognize the full drive.

Armed with what I now know, I can create a small partition at the beginning of the drive for a boot partition and install the Windows image in the next partition. That will still leave a partition near the end unused. It may be possible that Windows FIXMBR and/or FIXBOOT will work if there's a small partition near the beginning of the drive. If not, I can install linux and let grub manage the boot for me.

Have you scanned the disk yet? A bad sector can prevent the system from using the entire disk until a scan has been performed and bad sectors marked off.

The disk was fine. The problem was with the laptop's BIOS. It's an older laptop and the latest BIOS update for it on Dell's site was from 2005, so the largest drive it recognizes is 137 gig. Many years ago, the master boot record had to all be in sector 0 of the hard drive. At some point (I forget when this happened) the MBR became larger than 1 sector, so they implemented a two step process. Sector 0 has a small loader that then passes to the larger piece of the MBR. If you restore an image and tell it to expand to the full drive, but the drive extends past what the BIOS can see, the loader in sector 0 can't find the rest of the MGR and booting fails.

I deleted all the partitions, created a small one at the beginning of the disk, told the image program to use as much of the next partition as the BIOS reported exists and restored. Then I booted the Windows CD in restore mode, ran FIXMBR and FIXBOOT and there's now around 70 gig free.

If your original 30GB hard drive is still intact, I would suggest trying a product called, 'Clonezilla'. It's a live Linux release that will allow you to make an exact (including boot segment), copy of a disk partition, on another hard drive.

The two drives do not need to be identical. The only restriction is that the 'receiving' partition must be at least as large as the original.

I have used this product several times at work when upgrading to a larger drive, and it has always performed flawlessly.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I've got a working drive now. I also didn't want an exact copy since I wanted to expand to take advantage of the larger drive and keep it on one partition.

The original 30 gig drive is long gone. The 60 gig drive is sitting in an enclosure where it can be used to back up some files.

The new drive was installed a couple of days ago and already has more than 60 gig (the reason it needed to be replaced) so there's no going back and there's no need to find anything to make it work since it's working now.