250GB HD turned into a 120GB HD

[glock40]

I have a Dell Inspiron e1505(laptop). I have two 2.5" hard drives. One of them has Linux and the has Windows XP. My linux hard drive is a 250GB HD and my Windows HD is only 120GB. I wanted to move my Windows install complete with recovery partitions everything over to the 250GB HD.
So I wiped the 250GB HD and then booted into a Linux environment that I setup on a USB stick. I then used the following command:
"dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc"
That then cloned my windows HD onto the bigger one. After it finished, I booted into my new windows environment in my 250GB HD and noticed that the hard drive now was only 120GB and no longer 250GB. I checked using windows' partition manager, fdisk, and Gparted. They all said that the hard drive was 120GB.

I need to restore the hard drive to it's former state. Did maybe the system volume information on the smaller drive overwrite that of the larger drive?? If so how do I fix it. I'm lost can someone please help?

[HROAdmin26]

"dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc"

You copied the partition table which says "the disk is X big, and these are the partitions." The disk may have changed, but the table still says it's X size. The gparted live distro can probably resize the partitions to use the full disk. Google for more info.

[glock40]

Ok, thanks, I'm downloading the live CD right now.

[glock40]

so i booted into Gparted Live CD and then did a data rescue and it found nothing. What should I be doing to find the missing space?

[glock40]

So i decided to try using hdparm to restore the hard drive.
so I put in the command:
hdparm -N /dev/sda

then i got the output of:
max sectors = 231496650/488397168, HPA is enabled

so then i inputed:
hdparm -N p488397168 /dev/sda

I then got error output of:

setting max visible sectors to 488397168(permanent)
SET_MAX_ADDRESS failed: Input/output error
max sectors = 231496650/488397168, HPA is enabled

I also tried:
hdparm -Np488397168 /dev/sda

and got the same error.
So whats wrong??

[glock40]

Ok the problem has been solved it turns out that after I did my HD clone. The LBA setting of the smaller HD(which was set to 28bit LBA mode) was transfered over to the bigger drive. I had to change the LBA mode to 48bit. When LBa mode is set to 28bit the maximum size of the HD can only be 128GB and that was the reason why I could set the max address of the drive to it factory capacity(250GB).

Thanks for trying to assist me.
I found the solution.