I have a Mac Mini With a 200GB Hard Drive. I want to upgrade it to a 500GB drive and I want to know what is the easiest way to get my OS and ALL of my files to the new hard drive. I am running Mac OS 10.6.1 It is the 2007-2008 Mac Mini running @ 1.8GHz.
— Leonard Bryan
Here's how I would. You need an external drive for Time Machine backups anyway. So get a 1TB external drive. Do a TM backup of the old drive to it. Then swap the drives. Boot with your OS X DVD and then do a restore from Time Machine to the new drive. Then, of course, let Time Machine continue to backup on its regular schedule from that point on.