Replacement For My Primary Harddisk

u are far better off reinstalling the windows on the new drives. new drives are always faster in transfer rates and access times. you can take a look at the tomshardware guide, hard drive charts to compare the two hd that you have. you didn't write down which gen they are so i can't check it for you.

i don't know any methods of cloning the drives. sorry

windows vista ultimate does have a complete imaging utility to help you basically clone the old drive to the newer one. type backup in the "run" box

oh and select the backup and restore center. then backup computer.

Thanks.

Once I have done a complete backup (on my new hard disk) how do I restore the backup on the same disk so that the new 500 GBdrive will be bootable and will replace my older 80 GB drive?

You could download a trial version of Acronis True Image and clone the disk.
It will automatically copy the files from one hard disk to another, then shut down. Replace the new drive in place of the old drive and you are set.

A-1 advice.
Yes, do this. Clones your old drive to the new one, easy to use, works perfectly.

Thanks everybody!

Cloning via Acronis True Image trial version is certainly the best. When I got my HDD's, basically Seagate provided that software. The big disk I bought as a full retail package came with a CD incuding Seagate Disk Wizard. I found out later it is simply a customized Acronis. It is best to install it on your existing HDD, then run from there under Windows. But if you do not buy that way, just go to the Seagate website and download the software from them for free, the use it.

Important: Seagates' Disk Wizard will only make a clone ONTO a Seagate drive, but since you said that's what you are buying, no problem.

To use it, you start by connecting the new drive up as another unit in your machine. Boot the machine, then run the software. Among the options for setting up a new drive as a replacement for an existing one, you can choose options that will:
(a) partition the drive as you direct, including all the way up to one large volume (see NOTE below);
(b) Format the new Drive;
(c) copy absolutely EVERYTHING from old drive to new;
(d) mark the new drive as bootable.

When done, you shut down and change cables if necessary to install the new drive (at this point, it may be a good idea to DISconnect the old drive to avoid confusion). Boot up, go into BIOS setup (often by holding down the "Del" key during booting) and make sure you specify that the new drive is the one to boot from. After it's all working, you can reconnect the old drive and do what you will - maybe just partition (as a non-bootbale drive) and reformat it and use as the second storage unit.

NOTE: Before you do this, make sure your OS is updated. Windows XP, for example, could not handle HDD's over 137 GB (Windows calls that 128 GB) in its initial release, but support for huge drives (called "48-bit LBA Support") was added in Service Pack 1 and after. Similar for Win 2000, etc. Without this, you will be forced to partition your new drive into several pieces of not more than 128 GB and use them each as separate drives. That's not necessarily a problem, unless it's not what you want.