I did it!

I successfully installed a nice badass 500GB SATA hard drive into my machine. I did have to get a tiny bit of technical support via IM from jb0n, and he was enough of an asshole that he just gave me the little info I needed to figure out the problem I had myself and get it done. I consulted via phone with another friend to verify my plans for the partition, and that was that. Yay!

Now I've been getting this crazy idea to install a Linux partition on my laptop. Maybe Ubuntu...definitely not right this second, though. I have enough to do with the move right now. But in the future.....