Tell you what I would do.=20
Most PCs now have SATA drives, but they usually also have an IDE controller= which is usually used for the CD and DVD drives. So, if it is IDE obviousl= y you will need a new IDE drive. I don't know the biggest you can get but a= ssuming it's IDE, in a PC you can unplug the optical drives and plug both t= he old and new drives in.=20
Now you are not booting from either, you boot normally. (if it is a SATA dr= ive then still, same thing) You do not disturb your boot drive or OS at all= . You download a utility from the HD manufacturer's website for cloning. Al= most all of them have one and I have yet to se one that is brand specific. = For example while I wouldn't hit a dog in the ass with a Western Digital, t= heir cloning software should work fine.=20
You simply clone drive to drive, letting the default "shrink or grow partit= ion" to be. This SHOULD work.=20
Now the problem is if it will use the extra space. You would think it's plu= g and play that way but the capacity might be encoded in firmware or someth= ing. Manufacturers are MFs that way sometimes. Of course there may be a ser= vice menu setting for that. You will find out I guess.
If that is the case then you might need approximately the same sized drives= , and clone the original to all of them. Then delete everything on all of t= hem except for the original. You have a blank slate, and your backup to be = plugged in at will.=20
These utilities are pretty much the same thing as Norton Ghost, they copy a= n image sector by sector, not file by file. Therefore if the partition is n= ot DOS or NTFS, it should still work.=20
From what I've heard they were formatted with the Unix/Linux system, which = makes some sense for a couple of reasons I need not go into. Back then I he= ard that to replace a bad drive in these things you needed to use that form= at. This was of course in case of a drive failure, which is not the case he= re.=20
And having an external plug for a HD is not hrd to achieve, get the right c= ables and drill a hole, literally. I did something quite similar with a PC = a long time ago. I had some super long cables. But then this thing is not a= ll that big, standard cables should make it to the outside of the case. I h= ad a full server case at the time, a DVR is considerably smaller. Just don'= t count on being able to hotswap them.
If the drive is SCSI, you have a new set of problems. Solvable, but new. Mo= st PCs will need an interface card to deal with them. Probably twenty bucks= really, but then it doesn't disturb your OS or other drives. It would be n= ice actually to be able to access the files via PC but I wouldn't count on = it. MAYBE if you are running Linux. Maybe.
In fact I could be dead wrong and the cloning utilities don't work for Linu= x, if that is the format. Then you just need their version of the utility. = It's all free and if necessary you can just load a USB stickdrive and run f= rom that. Once the process is over, just put everything back the way it was= . Linux does not require installation to run.
J