I want to upgrade a 160GB Laptop hard drive with a 500GB new drive. I want to partion it so the recovery partition (Drive D) is the same size (or as close as possible) as the recovery partition on the old one. The old one 10.8GB capacity (11,685,326,848 bytes) and the remainder of the drive I want to be the largest capacity for C. How do I do this?

First off, before you do anything, create backups of your important files from the original hard drive. This is very important.

Okay, there are a couple of options. One is to use third party software to basically create a backup image of the recovery partition and then when installing your operating system on the new hard drive it will take you through partitioning the hard drive. Usually you can do this by choosing the disc and then choosing advanced options. The exact steps depend on the operating system, but for the most part you just enter the values for the partition you wish to create. Just create the partition for your OS, but minus the 10.8GB partition for the recovery.

Once your OS is installed, you should be able to use the third party software to reload the backup image of the recovery partition. Just keep in mind that when you make this backup image, it will probably take a few blank DVDs.

Ghost by Symantec is probably the most well known image backup software.

Acronis True Image can accomplish this task for you.
Using the advanced clone options you can specify the sizes of the new partitions that you clone from the old drive.

I used the simple settings to move from 100 Gb HDD to 320 Gb and it kept the current partitions in the same ratio as on the old 100 Gb disc.