New hard drive for mac, how do i move all the old over?

My partitioned HD on my mac now has too small a partition for the OS 10.3 to run stably. As I believe it is impossible to enlarge the partition OS runs on without erasing the whole HD first I want to put a larger HD into the mac. How can I move everything from old HD to new? I have all the panther and relevant application discs but I will lose all my mail messages, music etc. Or at least I will not be able to move them to the new HD etc without a fight.
Is there a simple way? I have the mac that is g4 blue, I think it will take a slave drive
I must stress I don't have a storage problem per se I could just get an external HD if that was the issue. I simply have too big a system now to run well on the stupidly small partition I created years ago. thanks
N

Nick:
You have given very little information on your computer, so it is difficult to give a comprehensive answer to your issue. A few suggestions:
1. It is neither necessary nor recommended to partition an internal Hard Disk Drive if you are running only one version of OS X on it, except on some older G3 machines which require that OS X be installed on the first 8 GB.
2. You can move/backup your entire HDD including your OS, Users Folder etc. by cloning to another HDD using a utility like SuperDuper
or Carbon Copy Cloner. You can clone to an external firewire HDD, to a second internal HDD, or to a second firewire Mac via Firewire Target Disk Mode. If you tell us exactly what mac you have and what other equipment I can be more specific.
3. It is possible to repartition your HDD on the fly. There are several utilities that are available like Volume Works or iPartition. However, I have not heard of successful repartitioning with those. The only one that I have successful reports from is DriveGenius, which, incidentally, has other functons like Directory repairs and disk defragmentation.
Please do post back with further questions or comments.
Cheers
cornelius
Message was edited by: cornelius

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