In order to preserve the "bootability" of your drive and all of your system settings, you'll probably be best served by using drive imaging software. The two titles that I know of are PowerQuest Drive Image (
http://www.powerquest.com/driveimage/index.html) and Norton Ghost (
http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/). These programs make an "image" file, containing all information about the partition, which can then be copied to a new machine and restored. The catch is that you can't create the file on the partition that you're imaging (since that would be chaning the information on it while you're making the image). So, if you only have one partition on the drive, you'll probably need to do some juggling to make it work out.
If you have enough space on your new drive, you could do the following:
- Install the new drive and partition it into two pieces, the first being the same size as your original drive.
- Create the image of your original drive, storing it on the second partition of the new drive.
- Remove the old drive entirely and restore the image file onto the first partition on the new drive.
This way you'd end up with an exact copy of your original C: drive, along with a D: drive which would be the remaining space on the new disk. After you're sure that the image restored properly, you could wipe the old drive and put it back in for extra space.
If that sounds convoluted, it is, but it should work, provided that there is enough space on the new disk to accomodate the operation.
Good luck!