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Hard Drive Installation Assistance Needed!

J

JCE3

Junior Member
I'm installing a new drive on my old system. I'd like for this new drive to become my primary drive. It's a WD100 ide. I already have an ultra 100 pci card installed. It appears that everything is hooked up correctly however, even though I can feel power running through the disk, set up as a slave, at the moment it doesn't appear yet in my computer as hardware yet. I've not yet gone through the software that came with the drive to see if it answer's my questions. The reason being I don't want to initialize this drive and then not be able to make it my C: drive. So if that is what I need to do first let me know and disregard everything else!

If not then I want this new drive to become my primary drive. I have a windows xp home upgrade disk that I used initially. Am I going to be able to do a new install on a disk without an existing operating system? If so any pointers?

If that works then I'd like to be able to copy much of the information from the old drive on to the new. Assuming I can make the new drive act as C: am I going to have problems copying from the old drive in the C: area? Again, any pointers?

I'm thinking that I'll partition the new drive an 20/40/40 split with the first 20 only reserved for Windows. Is this smart? Any suggestions are appreciated.

What else have I forgotten or should know before I tackle this install. I'm not totally scared to death of all of this just cautiously apprehensive!

Thanks in advance,

Jim E.
 
Does the ATA-100 card's BIOS make itself known during boot? If not, you would not expect to see the drive from your OS.
 
In terms of which partition winds up being C, it will be the first primary partition on the master drive of the first controller channel (if you have more than one). So, how or when it gets initialized won't matter. It may start out not as C, but if you change the order of the drives (usually done via jumpers on the back of the drives), it will change which is first.

In terms of your partitioning, I am a big fan of having a dedicated Windows partition for the OS, system utilities and maybe antivirus software. If you ever have to do a fresh Windows install, it is better on a blank partition, so you can reformat your dedicated Windows partition and not lose all your data. In terms of the sizes, 20GB seems a bit large for that, but if you don't need the space for anything else, no problem. Splitting the rest is a personal preference thing.

As far as getting the data from the old drive to the new drive, is the old drive one big C drive?
 
Both of the drives are plugged into the pci card, on one cable, my older 10g as the primary and the new 100g as the slave. If 20g is too big for windows, what would be an appropriate size?

I guess it will be ok to do the format using the WD "data lifeguard tools" disk that came with the drive.

If I'm understanding everything, once I change the jumpers and the order of being plugged in on the cable then the new drive regardless of what it has been labeled, when I first format, should then change to C: and so forth depending upon the partitions.

Also, I guess that if I do a new install of xp on the new drive the os will be able to tell that I've had windows on my machine before because the older xp os will be on my smaller drive?

Thanks for the help!

Jim E.
 
As far as the XP issue, I think you are going to have to call the Microsoft number to reactivate it. It may find itself, but I am told it sees any change of hard drive as being installed on a new machine. It probably will take you about five minutes to get an activation code out of them. But the OS is too paranoid to see a copy of itself and understand that "everything is okay."

Will the computer see the 100g drive as 100 GB, or does it have a BIOS restriction below that? If it sees the entire 100GB, I'd partition it and format it through Windows, myself, if possible. Actually, I'd probably be inclined to do it through the Windows installation.

I'm still a Windows 2000 user, and my OS partitions range from 5 - 10 GB. Mine are applications-oriented machines (I'm not a gamer), and 2000 with McAfee, the associated device drivers and software installed by various devices seem to take up a bit over 3GB. Give yourself some room for growth, but I think 10-15GB should be good. No problem with 20, it just seemed a little large to me.

With the configuration you described (100 GB as the master, 10GB as the slave), the primary partition on the 100 will be C. By default, the primary (and maybe only) partition on the 10 will be D. Then any logical partitions on the 100 will be next, followed by any logical partitions on the 10 (probably none). I know Windows2000 allows me to change drive letters around on everything except C. I've never tried it with XP, but it probably allows the same through the Disk Management function. You'd have to verify that with someone more XP-savvy than me. But that gives you the option to arrange it the way you want.

Of course, you do have the option of leaving Windows on the 10 and leaving it as the master, then divvy up the 100 however you like. As I understand XP, it will still require reactivation, but that might avoid a complete reinstallation of the OS. If you do that, you will then want to move everything non-OS to the 100.

One final possibility is to use PowerQuest Drive Image to move the 10GB contents to the 100. I've used Drive Image a lot before when jockeying between hard drives, and never had it fail. Let me caveat that with I've never used it on XP, and I've never used it on a drive that had to run a utility to get past a BIOS size limitation. But, Drive Image will allow you to change the size of the partition on the target drive while copying the data. In my experience with it, the OS has always survived the move and usually with all the settings intact. Of course, here we go again, you will probably have to reactivate XP through Microsoft.

Good luck. As long as you don't erase the 10 until you are sure everthing is working and stable, it is relatively low risk.
 
OK, sounds as if I might be able to handle this! I think I'll cut back to 10g on the windows side and figure out the other partitions as I move forward. Sounds as if I'll probably have to call windows and get the new code. I'll probably have to pay them for it as well!

I'll check out Drive Image as well.

Thanks for the tips.

Jim E.
 
Jim,

You will be amazed....the Windows call is free and only takes a few minutes. I had to do it with Office XP and was stunned that anything from Microsoft was 1) quick, 2) easy and 3) free!

Mark
 
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