Will I get any problems reimaging computer?

[Annuit Coeptis]

I ran out of space on my local hdd on my laptop and I want to upgrade to a bigger one. I bought an hdd that is bigger and that is compatible with my current laptop. I plan to take the old hdd out and put the new one in. The trouble is I don't want to have to deal with reinstalling all the programs that I had on my computer before. My plan to get around that is this:

1. I will backup my current local hdd data to an .dat file on an external hdd using drive image .dat file
   
2. I will then replace the old hdd with the new one
   
3. I will then install windows 7 on the new hdd as a clean install.
   
4. I will then partition the new hdd
   
5. Next I will restore the old hdd data from the .dat file to that new hdd.
   
6. I will then set that partition as the default boot partition and then boot from that partition ( it should boot exactly the way I used to have it right?)
   
7. Then I will delete the other partition with the fresh install of windows 7 on it and merge it with the new partition in order to make one partition (C
   
8. Then I will hope that everything will work the same and I will just have a bigger internal local hdd.
   

Are there any problems that I might encounter? I want to make sure that I anticipate anything that might go wrong because if anything bad happens I won't have a computer and I will have to rely on booting from my ubuntu live cd which is very impractical until I can fix the computer. So yes, is there anything I am forgetting or overlooking? Please advise, thanks!