Got my new 250GB drive now what.

[Emulex]

1. Many older apps dont support the 250gb.
2. Source is one big 160GB 7200rpm 2gb cache. dest is the maxtor 250gb ultra 8mb cache.
3. idea is to migrate flawlessly (ghost?)
4. I'm poor so any way to do this near free (i have a copy of systemworks from a while back)

the gotchas i can see is the old ghost is dos based and probably outdated for handling a 250gb partition
my 160gb WD shows as a 149GB partition so i'm guessing that it is the overhead/GB-Gigabyte(1024) thats showing this odd #. but as one partition.

how would you stage an "ghost" or whatever else is free to migrate the boot to the faster drive. an xbox doesn't really need 8mb cache nor 250gb so i can see booting would be better.

Lastly i run 37mhz locked pci on my AM64 motherboard, will the maxtor handle this as flawlessly as the wd 160? I know some makers are more friendly to overclocking the pci than others but honestly i can feel the speed of 37mhz pci over 33mhz pci specially when its the boot drive.

I have 2 80's in the other PATA port and 🙁 no SATA drives for the sata controller so i gotta make this work.

someone give me some strategy. I have used the "NEW" Ghost but it just makes images, you then can boot the cd and restore the images, but it seems awefully wasteful time wise to have to image 160GB drive to another 200gb (which i have) then undo the image back on to the 250gb. I would have to "borrow" such software from work. I'd rather not borrow software esp with how norton liveupdate likes to contact the symnatec server for updates.

Worst case i could just add the drive and put the swap on it, and take my other computers 120GB mp3 drive, and the two 80's and clean them up and put them on the 250gb, but i like using the two 80's for unrar'ing. the 7200.8 barracuda's seem to make a good source/dest with their speed. Keeping two drives for source/dest unrar seems to be much faster.

Whose got a game plan suggestion?

 

[spyordie007]

There's a lot of info in your post so I hope I'm not missing anything...

1. Many older apps dont support the 250gb.

Typically apps dont care about the size of a volume so long as I/O operations work (a function of the OS and hardware).

the gotchas i can see is the old ghost is dos based and probably outdated for handling a 250gb partition

Even the new versions of Ghost are DOS based; I'm not sure what kinds of limitations the older versions of Ghost have but you could find out easily enough if it would work if you hook both drives up and try to ghost from the old to the new. Did the drive come with software to migrate you to the new drive? (many do)

Lastly i run 37mhz locked pci on my AM64 motherboard, will the maxtor handle this as flawlessly as the wd 160? I know some makers are more friendly to overclocking the pci than others but honestly i can feel the speed of 37mhz pci over 33mhz pci specially when its the boot drive.

A couple of things here. First if you have OC issues it will likely be the controller that has the issues and not the drive; so if your controller is working with the old drive it should work with the new drive as well.

Not that overclocking matters at all because neither drive would be capable of saturating the PCI bus. I hear that you think it makes the system boot faster, I'm guessing that's simply the magic of the plecebo (In other words all in your head). Two of the 250s in a RAID-0 configuration would still have a tough time saturating the PCI bus.

someone give me some strategy. I have used the "NEW" Ghost but it just makes images, you then can boot the cd and restore the images, but it seems awefully wasteful time wise to have to image 160GB drive to another 200gb (which i have) then undo the image back on to the 250gb. I would have to "borrow" such software from work. I'd rather not borrow software esp with how norton liveupdate likes to contact the symnatec server for updates.

Make a Ghost boot disk and boot the machine with it. It should give you the option to clone disk to disk.