help with an old dell gx400

[philipma1957]

My buddy has an old dell gx400 it works 10 years old with original maxtor drive. after 2 days of trying to copy the old drive with 2 different cloning programs. (all failed) . I went a different method. The drive was a 20 gb with 170mb free space! ide type.

I pulled the drive and off loaded as much as I could so now the drive is 16.5 gb running windows xp. Amazing that it could last this long. He told me he has run it with 18.5 gb out of 19.1 gb used for a few years.

Well now that it has 15.6 gb full out of 19.1gb it is running better.

So far I have 10-12 hours time into trying to upgrade the drive to a 80gb ide I picked upped for 25 bucks.

Any suggestions on making a transfer to a new boot drive. His system has very little ram around 640 mb. I was really just looking to clone the drive from the 20 gb to the 80gb then toss the old 20gb drive out. Of course he does not have any soft ware discs I could fix this a lot easier if he did. .

I suppose I could find the key with a keyfinder program but if I do that and don't have an xp disc to load how do I install windows xp on to the new 80gb hdd?

 

[Bubbaleone]

Before you do anything more with the Maxtor, run a disk level diagnostic and correct any errors. If you're able to copy files from the drive but you can't clone it to another drive, then the Maxtor has errors and the other drive may also.

You must do a low-level format to the 80GB drive to remove any traces of old MBR or partition table information, and create a clean NTFS format if you expect a successful clone.

Maxtor is now owned by Seagate. Download SeaTools for DOS. Read "Step 2" of the instructions if you're unfamiliar with burning an ISO.

Thoroughly read through the Seatools for DOS tutorial. Using this utlity incorrectly could wipe out the XP installation.

Correcting errors on the Maxtor, and low-level formatting the 80GB drive, will give you the best chance to successfully create a bootable clone. Be sure to disconnect the Maxtor after cloning, before attempting to boot the 80GB drive.




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[philipma1957]

Thank you!