Way To Expand Drive Size After "cloning"?

The title I chose was probably not the best, come to think of it. It isn't so much the resizing part of this process as it is all the rest of it that I seem to be having problems with.Okay, first of all I need to specify that I'm just an average user when it comes to Windows 7 and hardware nitty gritty. to which I am very grateful. And here I am again, hat in one hand and a problem in the other. Here's the situation: I have a laptop whose hard drive I've outgrown, so I bought a larger one for the machine. I also bought a USB-based enclosure so I'd be able to have the drives share data. I installed the new drive into the laptop, and put the old one in the enclosure. The old drive is 160 gigs in size with only about 3 gigs open. The new one is 500 gigs.

I used Clonezilla to clone the 160 to the 500. This worked perfectly. But I wound up with a new drive that still only had 3 gigs open. There were about 340 gigs left unallocated. So I used another Linux-based utility -- Parted Magic -- to reclaim the unallocated space.Okay, I need to back up for a second. The old drive has two partitions, call them C and D. The D partition is fairly small -- about 10 gigs.So Clonezilla cloned both partitions at their original sizes, but the funny thing was, it set the D partition ahead of the C partition. When I picture the graphic display that I get with a disk partition program, in my experience, the left most partition is the root partition, or "C". But for some reason, Clonezilla put D there, and C to the right of it. Well, I thought it probably doesn't matter because the OS can boot from other than the root partition -- or whatever it's proper term is -- from what I understand. So I expanded both in Parted Magic to take up all the unallocated space. Then I ran it and everything was set.

Went to boot the computer and no go. It couldn't find the boot sector or whatever. I didn't write down the error message so I don't recall the precise wording, but that is essentially what it was telling me. So I booted Parted Magic again, and took a look. Well, the "C" drive had the "boot" flag set, so I didn't really understand what the problem was other than it being out of place.So this time I deleted the D partition so that C was the only one and moved C down to take up D's space. Linux is assigning each of these partitions a name or descriptor, like sba1 and sba2. Well, D got the sba1 and C got the sba2. When I deleted D, C's descriptor didn't change. It's still sba2. I dunno if this will matter or not.Right now, I'm waiting for PM to finish moving the data as the C partition is expanded. Got another hour or so to go before it's done. I guess I'll find out if my workaround has worked.

My object was to transfer all the data from the old disk to the new, and to be able to access all the space in the new drive (duh). I also wanted C and D partitions. After the moving and expansion of C has been completed, there will be about 275 gigs of unallocated space left. My thinking is that if my latest attempt is successful, I'll go back and configure the unallocated space as D and then copy D's data off the old drive onto the new.So anyway, the point of this long-winded post is to ask the all-knowing forum mind how I should have done it and whether what I'm doing now will work. So the next time I can avoid the hours I've spent spinning my wheels. If I have to start all over, I'm prepared to do that, but before I do, I would like to find a way to "clone" the old drive (probably not the best word choice) AND expand the two directories at the same time. Clonezilla did not allow for this, near as I can determine, so I'm wondering which other Linux-based utility I can use? I've got a couple of disks of Linux utilities, and for all I know I might have one of them already. From what I've recently read there's also a Windows 7 Disk Management Tool that can do the resizing? I'm not at all familiar with it.