Muzman on 14/8/2008 at 05:43
I last bought a hard drive about a year and a half ago. It cost me a decent amount of scratch and it's only 160gigs. I set it up as my main drive and moved the old one (80gigs) into secondary position, kinda.
In the time since the prices and sizes have changed somewhat and it's probably time I stopped the endless shuffle of stuff around internal and external drives and burnt DVDs to keep free space up.
Today for less money than the last drive I can get 300g (Madness!), or for slightly more 500g (Blasphemy!) or even 750g (SPARTA!). A good move methinks. There's a couple of tricky things;
Ideally I want the new one to replace my secondary drive without a hiccup so I'll ghost it over with all the installs intact. Does XP approve of this sort of thing with its drive information and so on?
Secondly, I think I've only got the old Dos version of ghost lying around. Are there any other programs of that sort (ideally free)?
Third; despite setting it up as the primary drive, XP decided in its infinite wisdom to call my large drive the E: drive. The old drive is still C: (and still FAT32). This strikes me as something that XP will find a way to screw me with when I try this and make me do a full rebuild which I really don't want to do. Any foundation to these fears?
(I'll leave the other interesting juggling act for now: I'm all out of IDE slots, but I might get SATA since they're the things these days. But I'm out of power internally anyway. And then my external enclosure is only IDE. I could do with a new extrnal case I guess)
Any pointers most appreciated
Brian The Dog on 14/8/2008 at 08:10
First thing to say - back up your computer fully before attempting this! :) Also, format your new hard drive to NTFS in Windows using Disk Management Tools.
One way of completely backing up a hard drive is to download the CD ISO of Ubuntu 7.10 or later, and run off the live-cd. This has both SATA and NTFS support, so you can see all your hard drives, and since you're running from the CD, you will have read-write access to all files on them. You can then copy and paste files all the files across to your blank hard drive from your Windows hard drive. Just make sure you make system files visible in the View options.
I would STRONGLY recommend doing a "copy and paste" rather than a "cut and paste", just so you don't change anything on your old bootable hard drive.
Windows always places the hard drive with the OS on it as the C: drive no matter how you set them up in the BIOS (unless you're installing a secondary Windows OS). So after doing the above, remove all hard drives except the one you just copied data to, make sure that is bootable in the BIOS, and hopefully it will all work. You can then add your other hard drives when you've verified that Windows XP boots OK from your shiny new hard drive.
I say "hopefully it will all work", since it should as you have the SATA drivers installed in your current Windows setup. If you want to be absoutely sure, then buy the same (IDE or SATA) type that you're replacing, but I don't think that's actually necessary. One thing that will NOT work using this method is if you change the drive letters of your secondary hard drives and they have programs on them - this will mess up the registry settings for those programs.
I would wait to see if other TTLG's give this the thumbs-up though, as I've never done it. However, if you do the "Copy-Paste" option and it doesn't work, it will just write useless data to your new shiny hard drive - you can carry on booting off your old 80Gb whilst thinking of new otions.
Quick edit - since you were wondering about the drive letters Windows assigns, thought I'd mention that in XP and later you can change all drive letters except the one Windows is on in "Disk Management Tools", under Administrator Options. So don't worry if your DVD / Hard Drives have the wrong letters after doing your data moving - you can re-assign them back to the correct values afterwards.
Muzman on 15/8/2008 at 10:03
My XP boots from E: for some reason. It didn't want to reassign the old C: to anything else. But as you say I can change it later. Cheers for that. There's quite a few useful tools buried in around in XP. The Ubuntu tip is intriguing too.
I went for an old IDE drive this time, mostly because my external enclosure is IDE. I'll move over to SATA and get a SATA enclosure together one of these days.
Since this is only a spare drive I'm copying to the new one do you think that a straight file copy with all files viewable will work ok then?
I've always been under the impression that there's too much hidden stuff to really be sure it'll go smoothly (but then again that was usually concerning boot drives with some Windows on them in the past)
Also; changing drive letter assignments seems like it would bugger up current installs. Is that right or is XP clever enough to keep up these days?
Brian The Dog on 15/8/2008 at 12:22
Quote Posted by Muzman
Since this is only a spare drive I'm copying to the new one do you think that a straight file copy with all files viewable will work ok then?
I've always been under the impression that there's too much hidden stuff to really be sure it'll go smoothly (but then again that was usually concerning boot drives with some Windows on them in the past)
Yes, if you were copying files from the hard drive that Windows XP is on, and were booting into XP, then it wouldn't let you copy all files. This is why you need to boot into some other OS from a different "drive location" (e.g. Ubuntu off a CD). So it should all work, providing you make sure in Ubuntu that you make all files viewable in View -> Options, and "copy-paste" rather than "cut-paste".
Quote Posted by Muzman
Also; changing drive letter assignments seems like it would bugger up current installs. Is that right or is XP clever enough to keep up these days?
What I'm saying is that if you only have your XP hard drive present, it will assign hard drives that you subsequently add, in the order in which you add them - this may well give them letters that you did not have earlier. So you may want to change the locations to "un-bugger" the locations that XP has placed them to. XP is not clever enough to know how to do this itself. Note that this is only a problem if you have programs installed on those hard drives - if they are for your generic documents, then it shouldn't matter.
I'm a little unsure as to how it will cope with booting into the E:\ drive, but since it seems happy enough to do it now, it should all still work fine. But hey, since you're only copying the data rather than removing it from the original hard drive, I'd give it a go and just try it - the worst that can happen is that it can't boot off your shiny new hard drive, in which case you just boot from your 80Gb XP hard drive, and ask around for new ideas :)
Muzman on 18/8/2008 at 10:37
Alrighty; I put the new drive in my external case, formatted it and did a straight copy of everything on C. There were a few worries with System Volume Information, but otherwise OK. Then I took it out and plugged it in to the box. I started 'er up and reassigned the drive to be C: like the old one and restarted.
A couple of days later and I can report no problems at all (yet).
That seems pretty easy, just like the old days. I guess I'm too nervous about the unknown of XP and NTFS. It's still just bootdrives that are the main worry.
The System Volume Information is probably buggered on that drive, but I guess I can just set a new restore point and that'll update it.
cheers for the tips.
Zerker on 18/8/2008 at 11:07
Quote Posted by Brian The Dog
Windows always places the hard drive with the OS on it as the C: drive no matter how you set them up in the BIOS (unless you're installing a secondary Windows OS).
From my experience, Windows will auto-label your drives when it boots into the setup, and then persist those letters forevermore (well, you can change them all except the boot drive). I had really annoying issues one install of Windows because it was lettering my USB drives BEFORE my SATA drive. With one external HD and four drive letters for the card reader, Windows wanted to install onto H!
Second attempt I unhooked everything else first.
sNeaksieGarrett on 23/8/2008 at 05:45
Quote:
Quote Posted by muzman
Since this is only a spare drive I'm copying to the new one do you think that a straight file copy with all files viewable will work ok then?
I've always been under the impression that there's too much hidden stuff to really be sure it'll go smoothly (but then again that was usually concerning boot drives with some Windows on them in the past)
Yes, if you were copying files from the hard drive that Windows XP is on, and were booting into XP, then it wouldn't let you copy all files. This is why you need to boot into some other OS from a different "drive location" (e.g. Ubuntu off a CD). So it should all work, providing you make sure in Ubuntu that you make all files viewable in View -> Options, and "copy-paste" rather than "cut-paste".
I've found that windows xp is really weird about file access and quite a pain... I've done copying from one windows xp drive to another drive for backup purposes (i.e., sticking my internal drive into another drive and copying the files over to the other hard drive for backup) in the past and get "access denied" at some point causing the whole copy process to fritz up.:(
I found a program a while back called (
http://www.ruahine.com/) y-copy, which is free, and is a very fast file copier... Of course, this assumes you are actually on a computer in windows and are just trying to copy that way... But what Brian says I never thought of. (Running ubuntu live cd to copy the files or whatever) And I've never used those backup tools in windows; I'm always backing up the folders pysically myself onto other drives.
Quote:
Windows always places the hard drive with the OS on it as the C: drive no matter how you set them up in the BIOS (unless you're installing a secondary Windows OS).
Unless when installing windows xp you change the drive letter. Which is what I did on my desktop computer, since C: drive is windows 98, and "D:" drive is windows xp, even though windows xp is technically considered the boot drive.
CaptSyn on 23/8/2008 at 14:34
If you want to clone a hard drive, the best thing to use is Acronis Disk Director Suite or Acronis Migrate Easy. Even a chimp could do it easily with these apps.
Disk Director Suite includes all the features of Migrate Easy, since they no longer update Migrate Easy, but it's still available for download and is fully functional for 15 days.
No need to worry about different drive or partition sizes either. While Acronis isn't free, their trial versions are, and they are fully (or mostly) functional for 15 days.
There's no need to copy/paste or click and drag files/folders to the new drive. That's just ridiculous.
Also, you can change your drive letters as you see fit once Windows is installed via Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management.
(
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/)
