Copying Drives Question

Wrong. First of all, Acronis and most other cloning tools will transfer ALL your existing Partitions to the new drive as separate Partitions. OP says he (she) does not want that.

Secondly, although Windows will allow you to Expand an existing Partition into Unallocated Space that is immediately adjacent to it, it will NOT do this for the Boot Partition. This is Windows' cautious way of preventing you from tampering with the Boot Partition in a way that MIGHT cause a problem and destroy the boot "drive". So Windows' built-in tools will not do that job. You CAN do that job with other third-party tools, BUT you should ALWAYS BACK UP your data before doing so, just in case. Partition Magic is one such well-known tool, and I know there are others, including some freeware.

Using a cloning tool like Acronis you could do this, MAYBE (I'll get to that detail later). You clone ONLY the Boot partition (your C: drive) from old to new HDD. Do not clone the other Partitions. When you use Acronis, it normally presents you with a list of settings to confirm before doing the job. Do NOT just click on "Yes" or whatever. READ the instructions to find out how to exit to the menu system and change things. There are two things to set up. The first is that, with a multi-Partition Source Drive, Acronis will propose to create on your new HDD unit new Partitions for all of them in a proportional sizing system, whereas I suggest you should clone ONLY the boot Partition. The second thing is the size of the new Partition it is creating on the new Destination drive to accept the boot Partition data from the old one. You can make this whatever size you want, up to the full size of the new HDD unit. This is one easy way to expand your boot drive during the cloning process. (It's also somewhat safe, because cloning does not WRITE to your SOURCE drive.) After you've set these things, the rest of the options like Bootable (yes) and File System (NTFS), etc. probably are right and can be accepted. Then you can tell it to go ahead. BUT read on before you do this.

A small note: you can buy Acronis True Image, and it's very good, capable of LOTS more than just cloning. But you can also get free cloning tools from some HDD manufacturers' websites. For example, IF you buy a new Seagate HDD, their site will let you download a utility called Disk Wizard that is a customized version of Acronis that will only make a clone TO a Seagate HDD (they don't care whose old drive you are abandoning). This is their way of inducing you to buy their hardware. Similarly, IF you buy your new HDD from WD, get their utility Acronis True Image WD Edition. Other HDD makers may have similar utilities for cloning. Whatever you get, read the manual file that comes with it so you know how to use the menus to make choices.

Now here comes the big "BUT ..."

You say you have lots of stuff on other Partitions on your old drive that you want to copy to one big (presumably the C: ) Partition on the new drive. IF that stuff is ONLY user-generated data files, you should have no problem. Copying from the old drive to the new drive's C: "drive" should work well. Sometimes, though, a simple copying can run into trouble if you don't know there are unseen files.

HOWEVER, you will have a problem if some of that "stuff" on the other Partitions is actual applications software - things like Microsoft Office, or Firefox, or Adobe Reader, of graphics software, etc. Those things must be INSTALLED so that the Windows Registry is updated with particular information. Right now if you have, say, "Call of Duty" installed on your old E: drive, the Registry knows that's where to find it. If you clone to the new HDD, that Registry will still know that. If you then simply COPY the COD folder from that old Partition to the C: Partition of the new HDD, the Registry will never find it there! So if you have application software installed on those other Partitions, you will probably have to Uninstall them, the re-Install them on the NEW C: drive once it's working. You MIGHT need a bit of help from the publishers of such software, in case the re-install won't work because it thinks you are trying to do an illegal second installation. In fact, in planning this whole thing out, you might contact those publishers' Tech Support sites and ask for advice before starting.

Good Luck! Replacing an old HDD with a new larger one is a great idea, and cloning tools make the job easier. You just need to be aware of some of the little wrinkles that can pop up.