Copying hard drive

[gen3000]

Hey,
Basically I have a 250gb internal drive and an 500gb drive in an external USB enclosure.
The 250gb drive is split into 2 partitions - 40gb and 210gb. I think these partitions were kinda stupid now as I had never partitioned before and did it went I built my PC (could someone recommend as to what I should do it for next time?). There is only 4gig left on the 40gig partition and 33 gig on the other.
On my external 500gb drive I have no partitions and 344gb free.
I wanted to basically swap the drives over. Is this possible and easy? I want to put the 250gig drive in the enclosure with all the data (exactly the same) that is on the 500gig drive. And the 500 gig drive inside the PC so that my PC runs exactly the same as before (with all the 250 gig's data) but with the extra storage.
Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[gud4u]

Most HD manufacturers offer free utilities to clone the content - and partition structure - of one hard drive to another.

Cloning a smaller drive to a larger drive and cloning a larger drive to a smaller drive (assuming there is enough free space on the destination drive) is accomodated.

Partition size adjustment is offered in two ways:
- Auto-scaling the partition sizes, with yes/no prompt to accept the suggested partition sizes, or;
- Manual adjustment of partition size allocation.

I've used free utilities by both WD and Maxtor to clone to/from both larger and smaller multi-partitioned drives, and both behaved identically and reliably. The clone function in Acronis TI10 behaved identically.

Some commercial software vendors to look at include Acronis, Paragon, Terabyte - just Google 'partition management'. True partition management software allows partition creation, merging, splitting, deletion, sizing, backup/restore, clone and some (Paragon) even include defrag function in one program.

Hope this helps!