HDD capacity not being recognised

I made a complete PC backup because i had a feeling my HDD would fail. Believe it or not, a week later it did. My laptop was still under warranty so i sent the dead drive to Gateway and they sent me a new one. My old drive was a 200 gig and the new one is a 250. Once I completed the restore windows only detects the 186GB availability of the 200GB and not the full capacity of the 250. I am using vista ultimate. Is there anyway to fix this?

So apparently the Restore operation resored an exact duplicae of you original drive including making it the same size, 200 GB. That must leave 50 GB as Unallocated Space. Unfortunately, Windows will not change the size of the BOOT Partition.

However, there are third-party software tools that will add contiguous Unallocated Space to your Boot Partition. Partition Manager is one, but it's not free. There are some freeware tools for this. Search the web for things like "Expand Partition" or "Change Partition Size".

what did you use to back it up.. i know ghost and acronis both support expanding partitions to the drive size when restoring if you check a box.