Results of upgrading my Mac Mini HDD, cloning, partitioning to maintain Vista setup

I spent the weekend, amongst other things upgrading my mac mini hard-drive from the standard 80GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard disk drive to a Toshiba GB (note: 20GB must remain for MacOSX when using Bootcamp)MK2035GSS 4200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA/150 Notebook Hard Drive.

I'm also thinking, at some point, of upgrading the CPU to a Intel 2.16 Core 2 Duo Mobile CPU, but that can wait.

After doing quite a bit of reading and research on how to upgrade, I remembered from my memory installation there are some great videos here: https://eshop.macsales.com/tech_center/installation.cfm

Replacing the drive physically was the easy part. The difficult task was cloning my drive. With bootcamp you have three partitions (one that bootcamp needs, one that MacOSX uses and the Vista partition).

 The first mistake I made was to try and use my old copy of Norton Ghost 2003 on the machine (even ignoring the warnings not to use it). Norton worked fine - it was just the DOS client that never booted up. This then presented some issues around how to get Vista back working (mucking around with the BOOTSECT.BAK was the solution there). I then went to focus on the Mac for cloning, trying first SuperDuper, then NetRestore and finally the elegantly simple Carbon Clone Copy (CCC).

The CCC image I put on my external SATA (200GB Toshiba) seemed to copy fine but when I finally put the new drive into the Mac Mini it wouldn't boot up. The screen would go white for a bit then no signal would appear, the MacOSX disk wouldn't even boot up. I found in the depths of an article on the apple site the combination of COMMAND, OPTION, P an R keys would reset the programmable RAM (what this does I'm not sure, but I was desperate). When trying this on boot-up the beep was louder the white screen shorter and then on an automatic reset - it booted into MacOSX.

Great you would think, but then disaster struck. It wouldn't let me run bootcamp to partition the driver. It was complaining about the volume type. Apparently in Disk Tools the drive needs to be marked as GUID and this hadn't happened on the CCC. So, in the end I just reinstalled the lot. Then copied the data from the original drive to the new one. It all works a treat now and seemingly much faster with lots of room to move.

This now scares me in terms of security, so one of my next experiments is to play with BitLocker from my home MacBook Pro running Vista. I will need to upgrade to Vista Ultimate, but I think its an inevitability if I am to value my privacy. I don't care so much about my photos or music but I do care about documents, emails and the like. Anyway will post here any significant findings.