[nflug] Replacing a Notebook Drive ....

[Joe]

I know this is a bit off topic, but I know you guys know disk drives. 
Feel free to respond off list.
I'm not sure how much detail is needed to answer this, so I'll try to
err on the side of too much.

I have an HP dv5000 notebook (Centrino duo 1.6GHz) dual boot kubuntu
hardy and Win XP.
It has a Seagate ST9120821AS Momentus 5400.2 - 120GB SATA-150 5400 rpm
drive that still works, but has a partition with too many hard errors to
map out in hardware.  I need to replace it while it still works.

I can get (almost) the same drive (5400.3 - whatever that means) for
around $50, but I see I could also get
a 7200rpm 200GB for around $75.  The first one of these I found is a
Hitachi Travelstar 7k200 which is also SATA-150 and has 16MB cache
instead of 8MB.

Questions:

As long as I stick to SATA-150 and 2.5", will any drive work?  Does
increased capacity present any issues?

Will a 7200 rpm drive eat my battery much faster, get much hotter, or
make any more noise?

Will a faster drive noticeably improve performance?
I do mostly web surfing, email, passive multimedia
(watching/listening/peer to peer file sharing) - not
authoring/editing/serving), digital photos (lots), and word processing. 
I'm not a gamer.

Any brand/model recommendations/warnings?

Once I get the new drive:
 
What's the easiest way to clone everything from the old drive to the new
one?

I do have some pieces of the puzzle:
I have an external SATA/IDE to usb adapter I can plug the new drive
into, so the hardware part is probably solved, but I'm not that familiar
with dd commands, etc.  I can use gparted to partition/format the new drive.
And, if I need them, I have a couple of usb disk drives, one that's
unused with 120GB total and another that has stuff on it, but has over
100GB free.

Should I make bigger partitions (to use the bigger drive) before or
after everything is transfered from the old drive to the new one?

Will I have to create a new MBR or can the old one just be copied to the
new drive?

The notebook has the usual windoze garbage on it  - a bunch of restore
data because windoze was pre-installed and it didn't come with
installation CD's.  I need to  make sure all that gets copied too.

qtparted shows:
/dev/sda1 ntfs 39.06 GB windoze
/dev/sda2 ext3 29.78GB spare
        the one with the disk errors on it
        (so gparted failed when I tried to
        merge it into sda4)
/dev/sda4 ext3 38.4GB kubuntu
/dev/sda3 extended 1.69GB
   /dev/sda5 Linux-swap 1.69GB
/dev/sda-1free 2.86GB hidden
        (I couldn't figure out how to merge
        this into another partition.
        gparted didn't seem to
        want to have anything to do with it.)

What, if anything, do I need to do about /dev/sda-1?

Why couldn't I get rid of it?

Could it be some sort of hidden restore or hibernate partition for
windoze?  When I run virus scans, etc. on windoze, it goes through a big
pile of stuff that seems to be there to restore/reinstall windoze and
all the junk that came with it, so I think that must all be on /dev/sda1.

One last thing:

When I exited qtparted (run from konsole), I saw the following and need
to know what's up with it.
It may have to do with /dev/sdb which is a usb disk drive with two data
partitions on it, one for windoze and one for  Linux.  I'm not worried
about the ntfs stuff because gparted handles that without blinking.  Or,
the messages may just be because I ran it from within Linux on the same
drive because I knew I wasn't going to change anything.

sudo qtparted
[sudo] password for bigbird:
No Implementation: Support for opening ntfs file systems is not
implemented yet.
Error: File system was not cleanly unmounted!  You should run e2fsck. 
Modifying an unclean file system could cause severe corruption.
Error: File system was not cleanly unmounted!  You should run e2fsck. 
Modifying an unclean file system could cause severe corruption.
No Implementation: Support for opening ntfs file systems is not
implemented yet.
Warning: File system has errors!  You should run e2fsck.
Error: File system was not cleanly unmounted!  You should run e2fsck. 
Modifying an unclean file system could cause severe corruption.
bigbird at sananda:~$


TIA.

Joe