Upgrading Hard Disk Problem

[Jim Warner]

My System Hard Drive has started a bearing singing and
thought I'd replace it before it went kaput.

I'm replacing a WD 13Gig with a Maxtor 81Gig running
Windows XP Home.

Maxtor's MAXBLAST3 software appeared to transfer properly
but Word required a repair but blew-up. Install/Remove
functions of the control panel also failed. Maxstor
support suggested using Norton Ghost as their software
was having problems with WIN XP.

Loaded Norton SystemWorks 2003 but their Ghost program
fails repeatedly. Norton Support keeps telling me to run
Ghost with different options and to run CHKDSK. Numerous
runs have resulted in failure.

Back to Maxtor, they suggested running POWERMAX 3.04 to
verify the new disk is functioning properly. This
required that I load a new driver since my motherboard is
also new. With the new driver, POWERMAX certified the HD
was functioning properly.

Both Maxtor and Symantec are scratching their heads now.

Is it possibly a driver issue? I'm running an MSI K7N2G-
ILSR Motherboard with nvidea chips and an AMD Athlon XP
2500+ (Barton). The system runs FSB of 333 and DDR400 RAM.

Any help out there?

What is Microsoft's recommended method for upgrading a
system drive?

Jim