When I bring the drive up in party buffalo it shows a 239gb hd and a 15.9gb usb drive. I guess those are the two partitions. I can choose one or the other.
How do I recover from this? Do I take the drive out of the case and connect to the PC and run HDDHacker?
Actually, I think this is WAY simpler than you think to get the drive back. especially if you can do this on a Mac (10.5+)
Mac:
1) Cmd-space "disk utility"
2) click on parent drive
3) cleck erase, format as Fat
4) Done, it should automatically do one partition
Windows 7:
1) hit Win Key, type "diskmgmt.msc"
2) look for the drive in the program bottom window
3) delete the extra volume (15GB)
4) extend the big volume
5) erase/format the drive
I am 100% on the Mac instructions, but please google some tutorial for the PC and always confirm 100% you are selecting the correct drive since the OS drive will always show as an option in these programs.
There may be a more secure/stable way to re-partition in Windows.
Additionally, using all the steps in the OP to backup/restore to your new hard drive will work flawlessly if you follow instructions, but you could go the more expensive right and buy all the OEM cables etc for an ON XBOX transfer.