Best way to install a new harddrive without losing info.

[rbarbier 0]

Here is my situation. I have two harddrives right now on my computer. Both Fat32. C: has win98 SE installed and d: has Win2k installed. I am going to purchase a new harddrive on Friday. 40 Gig. I have a BE6 board so I am going to put the 40 gig drive on the HPT 366 controller to used UDMA-66. I want to know what is the BEST thing to do when I install this drive without having to reinstall all my stuff. My system is sooo stable right now it is scary.

 

I think I am going to partition the new drive into 2 seperate drives and copy everything from the C: to the first partition and everything from D: to the second partition. Will this work right? What "swiches" should I use. I think I am going to boot to a Win98 prompt, run fdisk, and partition it there. Then use xcopy /s/e/c/h/k. Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

[A-guy 0]

You wanna mirror your drive to a new one? You cant just copy the files over you still need a bootsector on that drive. I personally would do a full reinstall but if you are looking for a way I think you can just copy the files over and once they are over you can boot off the win2k cd-rom and repair the boot sector. xcopy.... it might work. very risky. Anybody else got any recommendations?

[rbarbier 0]

That is what I was thinking of doing. Copy everything over. Then install Win98 over my old win98 install then in Win98 install Win2000 over my old win2000 install. This should work I hope keeping everything intact.

[YuppieScum 0]

I would strongly recommend doing clean installs of both OSs, then reinstall apps and finally copy/import any data files. It's a real pain but incredibly worth it if only in terms of boot time.

 

It also means you can do a defrag between each step...a very good way of maintaining performance.

 

Otherwise, if you're committed to mirroring your existing drives, then use a tool like Ghost which will allow do migration between dis-similar volume sizes.

 

 

 

 

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SuperMicro P6DBS (dual UW-SCSI) BIOS 2.2, 2*Celery 300a @ 450Mhz, 384MB PC100 RAM

SCSI-A=4.3Gb+9Gb, SCSI-B=Tosh32x CD-ROM, Yamaha4416 CD-RW, Iomega ZIP100, IDE1=4.3Gb

IBM EtherJet 10/100 NIC PCI + Nortel ADSL "modem"

Matrox G400 DH 32Mb AGP + Quantum3D Voodoo2 SLI PCI (CL TNT1 AGP on a shelf)

SoundBlaster Live PCI (not Value)

Win2K build 2195 Retail (not 120-day eval)

[Ge0ph 0]

Get some Partition Magic boot disks and just copy the partition to the new drive then set it as master and your up and running. I have done this twice in the last month and it works real smooth.

[zildjian 0]

Here's the best way to do it:

 

Partition your new drive into C: for 98 and D: for 2000. Then boot into 98 on your old drive. Go to the run command and type:

 

xcopy32.exe c:\*.* e:\ /c/e/f/h/r/s

 

Where C: is the current 98 drive, and E: is the new to-be 98 drive. That will copy all the files off your 98 drive, including all hidden, protected, and system files. Then, do the same thing to copy your 2000 drive to the new one:

 

xcopy32.exe d:\*.* f:\ /c/e/f/h/r/s

 

Where D: is the current 2000 drive, and F: is the new to-be 2000 drive. Make sure you're still in 98 when you do that, cuz 2000 doesn't have xcopy32.

 

After that, hook up the new drive as the primary, and boot from a 98 boot disk, run fdisk, and set the C: drive as an active partition. After that you should have your system back to the way it was.

 

Rob

[Andersony 0]

I think I tried the xcopy routine when I upgraded my drive.... it's posted in here somewhere (I asked the same question, but didn't get many responses).

 

Of course the 98 crap will copy over and work just fine, I use this method almost daily (xcopy /h /e /r /c /k /y), and it works flawlessly.

 

The bummer is the Win2k (or NT) stuff. When I tried to up my Win2k (NTFS5) drive to a larger one, I tried the following:

 

I installed the new drive as master in place of my CD on the 2nd channel. I booted to 2k, partitioned and formatted the drive, and copied everthing over with the switches (at least the ones 2k will accept). Shut down, put the new drive in as Master on Channel 1 and booted. I found that it didn't have some of the system files needed to boot up. Soooo, I tried to reinstall (upgrade), hopeing it would repair what was missing. Setup couldn't find an exsisting version on my new drive. So, I tried the whole thing all over again in 2k Safe mode, thinking they were active and just wouldn't copy. SAME RESULT only a little better. I also tried using the Recovery disk when it couldn't find my exsisting version on the new drive, helped but still no joy !

 

Copying them from a 98 host computer was not an option for me, since my original drive was NTFS5.

 

So I got inventive and tried upgrading the disks to dynamic, mirroring them, and then rebooting and breaking the mirror. Which worked just fine, except, I found out that 2k won't allow you to resize the primary partition. So, I had accomplished my task of making an exact copy to the new drive, but couldn't use the new space under the same partition !!!

 

What I finally did was install a fresh copy of 2k onto a 5GB partition (drive c and copied all my programs and data to a second partition (drive d: 35GB). I then reinstalled (upgraded) all the programs so that they new they were now on d: and had reg. entries and system files in the new 2k directory.

 

After that, I made both partitions dynamic. So that, now if I upgrade my drive again, I can just mirror both partions to the new drive, boot to the new drive, break the mirror and adjust the second drive's size dynamically to use up the new space (Remember: it won't allow you to change the primary dynamic partitions size - thats why I used 5GB, big enough for the future, plus I had a spare 5GB that I use as a mirror for the boot partition as fault tolerence).

 

I hope someone has different resultzzz for ya, but thats the agony I went threw .. I actually I kinda like my new setup.

[farphle 0]

Two words... Norton Ghost. Just clone your current drives to the new partitions and you'll be done in an hour.

[rbarbier 0]

Nortons Ghost is what I decide to use. But to make things easier I am going to buy two 20 gig harddrives instead of one 40 gig harddrive to make things a lot easier. Plus I would rather have one 20gig crash instead of one 40 gig. Plus with the BE6 I have 8 ports so I don't think I will use all them up. Right now one 40gig Maxtor 7200 UDMA 66 drive is $299 at Staples and one 20gig Maxtor 7200 UDMA 66 is $159. So it is going to cost a little more but make things easier on me.

 

Now anyone with a BE-6 know what settings I should use in the bios to boot off the HPT366 controller?

 

Thanks.

[ViperZ2000 0]

Quote:

Right now one 40gig Maxtor 7200 UDMA 66 drive is $299 at Staples and one 20gig Maxtor 7200 UDMA 66 is $159. So it is going to cost a little more but make things easier on me.
.

That is WAY too high for a 20GB drive. You can easily get a 120GB drive for that.

Check out www.pricewatch.com or even Best Buy on Sundays. They have 40GB drives for about $50 after rebates. Also, look for the 8MB cache models since they have a 3 year warranty, unlike the 2MB cache models with 1 year warranties.

Hope this gets you more GBs or saves you some $$$

[ViperZ2000 0]

LOL...now I see the date of the post. Somehow it showed up as a new post today. Oh well...