It isn't designed to work with USB so the new drive has to be in the machine. I've been working on this all afternoon and am having trouble getting HDD Capacity Restore Tool to work. So is there a way to recover the lost space on the new 320G drive or is it toast? Thanks for the help! I assumed the MBR was overwritten by the MBR from the old drive and therefore assumed that the drive size is one piece of information stored there, but you're saying that's not the case. I even wiped it and installed Windows XP on it as a new install with the drive in the laptop itself and in every way it shows the same small size. This shows up in Explorer Properties, any partition manager I have tried to throw at it. Instead, the new 320 drive now shows its capacity as the same as the old smaller drive. I had understood from the Acronis messages that it would expand the partitions proportionally when cloning to the larger drive. I used Acronis True Image Home to clone my 80G drive to the 320, which I had placed in a USB adaptor box.
I got in trouble when I ordered a 320G drive to replace the 80G drive that came with the computer. I have never tried it so cannot know for sure. My Dell Inspiron E1405 probably has a media direct partition because it has a Media Direct button on the front of the unit.