First, are you sure you have two separate drives and not one drive with two partitions? It isn't a typical configuration to have two separate physical disks in a laptop. 

If it's just a single drive (or a dual disk configuration) and it is SATA you can plug the new and old drives into another system and use a program like Ghost (they offer a 30 day free trial) to image one to the other. I buy 6-10 new laptops at a time when replacing out field laptops and we have a disk with a standard image that we put on each laptop instead of configuring each one. 

I know there are other ways to transfer disk to disk but my experience is that if you are trying to image from the disk you are working off of, you have more issues because Windows just doesn't like it. 

Yes, I have actually seen the 2. I have 3 drives. The 1st is the Windows drive, the 2nd is where the HP recovery software is on (which is a ppartition of the 1st drive), the 3rd is actually a second drive in the computer.

OK, so considering what you said, I can take, say, the second hard drive I have out of the laptop and place the new drive in that slot and make a Ghost image of the main drive (which hopefully includes both partition) onto the new drive (even though the drive size will be larger - from 160 GB to 500 GB -  and faster) and then remove both drive and place the new drive with the Ghost image in the first slot and "should" work just fine (more or less)?

OK, I think I understand what you mean. Perhaps I can use my wife's laptop which is a slightly older modle of mine to create the image of my main drive then transfer the image to the new drive by replacing the drives after the Ghost images is created.

I have the most success not trying to image from the same partition that I booted from. I typically do it with a desktop pc so that I can boot the local system with the two drives I want to copy. Just make sure you pay attention to the drive sizes. Nothing sucks worse than trying to image the same size drives and copying the blank onto the good. It only took me one time to learn that lesson.

Thank you. I will definitely keep this in mind. I just have some issues with speed. My PC tends to be a bit slow at times, even though I have a dual core P4, 3 gb of memory, an 8600 gs Nvidia video card and not so many programs running in the background. I figure Vista is the issue and find myself considering putting XP as a dual boot.

Wow....that'd be bloody quick.....[gotta expect it's a typo.....7,200 ] ...

Drive Image 7 does it painlessly [does mine every Monday morning without error] ...

you gotta watch out though

the HP recovery partition is set up for the disk size you have in the PC. I had this issue when I transferred from a 160gb hard drive to a 250 gb hard drive in my desktop PC. I transferred the partitions over to the new drive using Partition commander then when I attempted to use the recovery console on the new drive ...