( OT ) Question for Computer Geeks

I have a 20G drive that is filled -- imagine that! -- and a 40G drive that
is not being used for anything useful. My wife has managed to install 20G of
applications and wonders why her machine is slowing down. She has external
HDDs (a Maxtor 500G and a 320G USB drive) to store her files on, so I've
already migrated all of her pictures and data off of the 20G drive, and she
only has about 3G of free space.

1. If I reformat the 40G drive, will this repair the Boot Sector? I do not
know the condition of the boot sector, but I tried a variation on the next
several questions to make the drive bootable, and it would not boot.

2. I want to unplug the 20G drive and plug in the 40G drive and have all of
the stuff on the old drive work seemlessly on the new drive. I do not want
to reinstall all of the programs and applications, I want whatever is there
today to be there tomorrow, with an additional 20G of free space.

3. I have a disk copy program that came with yet another HDD. I used that
program over my network to copy the 20G drive to the 40G drive, but the 40G
result does not boot. I made the Source drive (20G) a shared drive, then
went to my machine to access the shared drive with the disk copy program,
and send the copying result to the 40G drive connected to my machine. Do I
have to run the copying process from the source machine so that the result
is bootable when the target HDD is swapped into place?

4. I think that what I want to do is to clone the 20G drive to the 40G
drive. Then I can simply unplug one drive and plug in the other, and power
up. I'm not sure that I'm cloning properly, but the 40G drive has the files
on it now that the 20G drive contains, but it does not boot -- I get an
error message that important stuff for the OS is missing.

5. Do I have to initiate the cloning from the source machine as opposed to
doing it over a network?

I've never done this process, so there is a very good chance that I'm not
doing it properly. Any help is appreciated. I am looking at XXClone - Free
Version, to do this instead of the disk copy program that I used across my
network.






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