Thanks Geo. Yes, I think the dual boot has added a ton of complexity and I suspect that is what has caused the problems. If it weren't for Vista being stuck on that physical drive I would have had 500gb and plenty of room.

The cloning takes FOREVER, and two of the times I was doing it on a USB 2.0 external...very slow.

I keep my working data on a separate physical drive (L:), and I keep that backed up religiously.

Hopefully though when this is over I'll have 2x2TB internal drives and now I have a USB 3.0 enclosure for copying / examining other internal drives. And one of my 2TB externals was a 3.0 drive that I had hooked up to 2.0, so it should be 10 times faster.

Meanwhile, I have found a batch of 10 power adapters on eBay for $40 (vs $31 each at Amazon). So I may get through all of this yet. I am thinking that I will switch to the Easeus software as my system backup software from now on.

PS...I think the lengthy cloning time was also caused by the lack of free space on the c: drive.

Oh, and my system drive was all NTSF. Again, i think the slowness was due to lack of any space on the system drive.

Thanks for the recommendation on the software, it did the resizing that Windows would not do. What killed me was all the Cloning vs doing a Backup/Recovery.

SUCCESS! Backup and recovery was the way to go. The EASEUS software even asked me if I wanted to expand the C drive when it saw the new disk drive.

Thanks Roman and Geo.

I am just glad it all got taken care of. I am sure it was scary for you. Glad I could help what little I did.

Roman

Thank you again Roman. Your suggestion absolutely worked, I Just had to ensure myself that I had something to work with in case it didn't. Historically, I am the 1% on any 99% success stories.