My R60 currently has a 80Gb SATA and I just received my 250Gb drive.

I want to clone the HD so I can retain both the regular partition and the Thinkpad restore partition as well as all my files etc.

This is the first time I ever did such a thing, my other computers never had a restore partition.

Does anyone have any advice?

Thanks!

What you are looking to use is a Symantic Ghost.

What you do is create an image of your old HDD, then drop the image onto the new one with the option of expanding said image to fill the entire new HDD.

http://www.symantec.com/norton/ghost

Go to the manufactures web site and you’ll find free software to clone your drive.
Here’s an example: http://support.wdc.com/product/download ... dc_lang=en

If you haven't already, get an USB enclosure for that now spare 80GB, and backup your stuff on it. I use Synctoy from Microsoft.