I need help with installing hard drives.

[ibex333]

I recently purchased a 500Gig HD from egg, and I want to use it as my primary HD and my old 120Gb HD as backup...

There's a number of things I want to do, but I'm not sure how to do them..

1)First, I want to install the 2nd HD and move all my stuff from the old HD onto the new one with the win XP installation. Is that possible?

2)2nd, I want to set the new HD as primary and the old as secondary... How should I go about that? Do I have to set master/slave jumpers or something like that?
What about the cables? Do I have to plug a separate sata cable into each HD and then plug them each into the mobo, or one sata cable will connect the two HD's together and the second will go from one of the HD's into the mobo?

3)If I do everything right, how will the HS's show up in Windows? Are they going to show as two separate drives or one drive?

4)I want to do a dual boot: WinXP/Win Vista. Will I have to insall each OS on a different HD, or both OSes on one HD?

 

[GeezerMan]

No jumpers needed for sata, just use the sata 1 port for the master. Separate cable for each drive, one per port. If it was me, I would use a program like disc director by acronis to setup a dual boot, on one drive with separate partitions. Then, when you boot the PC, you select which windows to go into to. I also use acronis to copy drives. You can also get free utilities to copy drives form western digital, seagate, etc, on their web page. The free utilities comes on the CD in a retail package drive. Sata drives show up in My Computer like any other drive, separately.

 

[ibex333]

Ok.. So now I just received the drive, and I need to copy everything from the old to the new. How do I do that? Connect the old as master and new as slave and copy? or this should be done a different way?

 

[humanure]

There are no master/ slave settings on SATA drives. Like geezerman said use a program like Acronis true image or the disc copy utilities from the manufacturers website. As an example here is the link for Western Digital. Should work with any drive. You'll create a bootable CD to copy drive to drive. Make sure to leave some unpartitioned space on the drive if you want to dual boot later like you said.

 

[ibex333]

Ok.. I installed the new HD by screwing it into the drive tray, connected the SATA cable and the PSU SATA cable.

Booted into windows, and.... The HD is non existent. I then put in my Win XP disk, and after I formated the new HD to NTFS and restarted I see two Win XP installations. One of them is my old one, and the new one tries to install win XP from where it left of after formatting.... I booted into my old installation of Win XP, and now it shows my new HD.

At this point I wanted to move the whole windows installation along with all the other stuff on the old HD to new HD. I got Acronis and used the clone option. I chose "As is" and Acronis was copying for almost an hour.... After that I booted into my old Win XP install AGAIN, to see if Acronis indeed copied everything to new HD. But, WHAT DO I SEE? The new HS is simply GONE! Windows doesn't see it again!


I went into my "computer Management" options and I see that my new HD now has everything from my old HD, but the rest of the space is unacessable! It shows the free gigabytes as UNALLOCATED. What gives? All I want is have everything from the old HD moved to the new one so that I can use my windows from there along with all my other stuff as if it was always there in the first place. After this I want to format my old HD and use it as backup.

 

[GeezerMan]

First, I would have done an Acronis backup of the old drive before messing with anything, to either DVDs or an external drive. That keeps you safe.
The unallocated space has to be partitioned with a partition program before windows can see it. You can then merge the partitions together. An easier way would have been to have Acronis copy the old drive to the new, with no partitions on the new, unless you wanted partitions.

If the old drive is still OK, I would back it up externally first, go back and have Acronis copy the old to the new with no partitions. It can be done so the whole drive can be visible and usable in windows.


If you want dual boot, I use another Acronis program called disk director, that sets up a dual boot pretty easily. When you use it, everytime you turn the PC on, you choose which windows to go into.

 

[ibex333]

***Some rant coming up - bear with me please, I gotta get this off my chest***


This is truly INSANE!!!

So anyway.. I cloned the old HD to the new HD using Acronis... I checked and double checked that everything is perfectly copied onto my new HD.

After that I decided to wipe the old HD, so I booted from my Win XP Disk, and selected to delete the partition on drive C. (drive D is my new HD)
My next step was "quick" formatting drive C. Since everything was done, I pressed the restart button with 100% confidence that the system would now boot into my new HD since it now contains a 100% clone of my old one.

Well, what do ya know? After a restart, the system wont boot!!! NTLDR is missing it says... but that's IMPOSSIBLE! I did everything correctly!

I was freaking out. I again booted into my Win XP disk, and as I was expecting the HD indeed contains everything that was copied to it.. Then why wont it frigging boot?

Then I had a "revelation". I opened my PC and switched the SATA cables on the HDs. I closed the case and booted up. EVERYTHING BOOTED UP FINE!. I got into windows and all my stuff is there... I still don't understand why it took me switching the cables on the HDs to get everything working. Why the heck didn't everything work from the get-go?


Anyway, now I have another small problem. For some strange reason, when I boot, it shows two Win XP installations. One is the one that works, and the other is broken and doesn work when I select it. It seems to be the installation from the old HD, but I cant imagine how it can still be here since I completely wiped the old HD.... Anyone know what's up, and how I can remove this non working installation? I actually checked and the old HD is 100% free.


And finally, a question:


I know this is a newb question but why the heck does my new 500Gig HD only have 465Gb? My old HD was 120Gb and 112Gb was usable. That's only 8Gb difference which is not so bad. But loosing 35Gb is a big deal. Is that even "normal" or my new HD is screwed up?

 

[GeezerMan]

Look at your sata ports. The first, or master sata port is not always on top. Look in the bios and see the hard drive boot order too. It was probably trying to boot from your old drive that had nothing to boot.
All drives never have the full space available ( I think it's cluster size, but don't quote me)

 

[AK3D]

Originally posted by: ibex333
I know this is a newb question but why the heck does my new 500Gig HD only have 465Gb? My old HD was 120Gb and 112Gb was usable. That's only 8Gb difference which is not so bad. But loosing 35Gb is a big deal. Is that even "normal" or my new HD is screwed up?

Many HDD manufacturers count a gigabyte as 1000,000,000 bytes - if you do the math, you come up with the above mentioned figure (the OS will use 1024 for a KB).

More info here -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte#Consumer_confusion

 

[Aarondeep]

Why must you insist on booting the XP CD to format/partition your HD? Next time, go into XP right click my computer. Select Manage. Then go to disk management and then find the drive you want and from there you can right click it and re-partion or format the drive. When you use the XP cd it copies pre-installation files on to the HD. This is the cause of your headaches.

 

[ibex333]

Originally posted by: aarondeep
Why must you insist on booting the XP CD to format/partition your HD? Next time, go into XP right click my computer. Select Manage. Then go to disk management and then find the drive you want and from there you can right click it and re-partion or format the drive. When you use the XP cd it copies pre-installation files on to the HD. This is the cause of your headaches.

Thanx! I didnt know that.

I cant believe no one else mentioned this.