Answers to a few of my questions will help me provide better answers to yours.

Which version of Ghost did you use?

When you created the Ghost image file, did you do a Disk-to-Image or a Partition-to Image operation?

Did you check the integrity of the image under the Ghost program immediately after creating it? You said that you checked it later with Ghost Explorer and all the files were intact. Are you sure? Could you check all of the hundred of files in a Windows installation so that you can verify this?

When you tried to reinstall the OS, did you do this by extracting just the Windows files onto the new disk?

Here are some partial and tentative answers to your questions:

The ?unknown? partition is most likely the Windows installation .cab files. These are generally placed in a hidden partition, and are needed for restoring Windows when necessary. If you did not get an OEM Windows CD or a Dell Windows Restore, this is almost certainly the case.

1. If you did a Drive-to-Image save, you need not partition the drive before restore. The restore will recreate the partitions. What I don?t know in this case is where the additional space on your larger drive will go? If it all goes into the hidden partition, it will be virtually useless to you until you reconfigure the drive. This might be possible using Partition Magic, or by Ghosting each partition individually to images, repartitioning the drive, then restoring the images.
2. Any restore of a Ghost image overwrites whatever is in the partition or disk to which the restore is applied.
3. If the images are good, then nothing other than restore should be needed.

I use Ghost on two networks, one of three systems and one of ten. The imaging is always Partition-to-Image this is, I feel, much safer and versatile than is Drive-to-Image.

Please let me know more about what you actually did, and I may have more suggestions.

Frank