upgrade hard drive

I also have an external drive, can I ghost the drive to there and then transfer it from there to the new internal drive?

Yeah, ghost it as "Disk to Image" though if you're going to your external.

I have seen hard drives of all makes fail.

I have just recently had to work on Seagate, WD, Maxtor.

I know Seagate owns Maxtor now, but back in the day they were junk. If you ever need a good data recovery program check out Spinrite from GRC.com. I have used that on three dead hard drives now, and it saved two of them. If the drive will not show up in Bios then you are screwed.

I agree. Spinrite is great. That guy also makes some other useful stuff too.