I want to clone my primary drive so I can use my new 500 gb drive what would be the best program to clone my drive to the new drive ?

If at least one of your hard drive brands that are installed including your new blank drive is Seagate or Maxtor, I recommend the latest version of MaxBlast found on the Seagate web site.
There is a *.pdf manual for it there too.

You have to install it on your hard drive that has Windows running on it, or on some other hard drive that has Windows running on it. After you have installed it you have the option of making a bootable CD or a set of floppies (but it takes a lot of them) with which you can boot any computer and run MaxBlast, but you don't need to do that if you can install it on your present drive that has Windows on it.
It is Acronis software, but some features are crippled. You can only copy the contents of an entire physical drive, however many partitions it has on it. If you don't want a partition on the destination drive, you have to delete it before you copy the original drive, e.g., in XP. It doesn't matter what the size of the destination drive is as long as the data on the original drive will fit on the destnation drive - the destination drive partition(s) will completely fill the drive (except possibly the last 8mb or close to that on the physical drive that XP normally leaves as un-allocated space) automatically, unless you manually over-ride that. If there is more than one partition on the original drive, the partitions on the destination drive are sized proportionately automtically to suit the size of the destination drive - take a look at the summary of what it is going to do before it actually copies - if the sizes of the partitions are not what you wanted or if there isn't enough free space in one of them, you can back up or quit and manually specify the partition sizes instead.
When you copy a drive that is bootable, the copy is automatically bootable as is - you don't need to fiddle with that (the MBR is copied too).

You could use the software that came with the new HDD or go to the Manufacturers Web Site to see what they have that will help. Usually downloads are free.

One question that only you can answer. Are you SURE you want a 500GB HDD as your primary HDD?

It's your choice, but current wisdom is that drives of such capacity are best used as Storage/Backup.

The cloning question has come up quite often recently. Surf the Threads on this site, lots of reccomendations and opinions available.

There is nothing to learn from someone who already agrees with you.

Oh im not sure about the 500 gig primary I was throwing out a number -- its all theoretical

capbam,
I used Norton's Ghost with great success in such type of situations.

Technology Bytes Plus
http://learnitfast.blogspot.com

How big is your primary drive?

"And that's the fishing line, because Sharkboy said so!"

old one is 160 new one is 500

I'd consider G4U if you don't want to use the factory drive's software.

"Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, are in my top 10

"old one is 160 new one is 500"

What's the purpose of the HDD swap? as Dumbob put it, "current wisdom is that drives of such capacity are best used as Storage/Backup". So why wouldn't you just keep the 160GB HDD as-is, connect the 500GB as slave & use it for storage & backups?

http://partition.radified.com/

"And that's the fishing line, because Sharkboy said so!"