To answer my own question I dowloaded a prlogramme called Minitool Partition Wizard 11 which walked me through making a perfrect clone of my old HDD to a 500gig drive in a HDD USB caddy. One time before I tried macrium which made a messed up version which fortunately one part it did get right was the recovery partition on the drive I was copying so when I reinstalled the drive the recovery tools fixed the errors but installed a fresh copy of XP losing all my stuff in the process.
