New hard drive, need help

[Haervii]

I just got a new OEM hard drive to replace my old one. However, i also want all the data on the old one to be transfered to the new because it would be pain in the ass to reinstall everything, plus I don't see how I could retrieve saved games and stuff. SO which is easiest,and/or possible?

1.Have both hard drives running in the computer and just add new stuff to the new hard drive and keep old stuff on the old hard drive

2.Transfer everything from the old one to the new and (hopefully) have it boot up

3. install windows and then transfer everything

Which is my easiest option, and how do I do it? I know about the fundamentals of IDE devices, primary/secondary master/slave but not much beyond that.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help out.

 

[Quad]

well, i guess the obvious would be to keep both if they're working fine. i mean, 2 hd's are better than one right?

if yur old one runs slower, then transfer some of the data from teh old one to the new one.

 

[Haervii]

It runs slower all right. REALL slower. But how do I transfer the data?

 

[Angst]

Easiest, but definitely not the cheapest, would be the buy norton ghost and clone the old drive to the new one.

 

[LeeBear]

You can do what you want for free without buying Norton ghost.

I'm assuming you have already partition and formated your New Drive (make sure you have a primary partition on it so you can boot from it later). Hook up the new drive to your computer. Download "Clone Directory" it's shareware... you can find it by doing a search at download.com. Install Clone Directory and clone everythin on your C drive to the new drive. Turn off your computer. Put your New Drive to master on the primary channel, and set the partition to "active" if needed. And boot... voila.

-LeeBear

 

[nightowl]

Another way to copy everything and be able to boot form your new drive is to go to manufacturer's web site and download their setup program. In their program it should provide a way to copy partitions from one drive to another. They also have a quick way to format the drive rather than the slow DOS command.

 

[Haervii]

Lee bear and night owl: Thanks for the help, but how do I format and partition it?

 

[Haervii]

That's my last question. Answer it and I'll give ya a cookie.

 

[nightowl]

If you download the utility from the manufacturer it has a slick utility to parition and format your drive. Just follow the setup steps and it will ask you for the if you want to make the drive on partition. If not, it gives you the option to specify the size you want and it will continue until you have used all of the available space on the drive. Then it will go ahead and format the partitions. In the utilities that I have used (WD & Maxtor) they will ask for a system disk to make your C drive bootable. Once that is done you will reboot, load the applicable cd-rom drivers, and install Win9x.

 

[dcdomain]

Depending on what you do... (I would take this opportunity to just fresh install Windows and copy needed data from the old drive to the new drive, then format the old drive and use that for backup purposes.)

This is what I would do. Install your new drive as the master, and your old drive as slave. Boot using a Win98SE boot disk, (you can download one from www.bootdisk.com). Boot with CD-Rom support, then type in FDISK. This should bring you into a screen that's self explanatory. They'll walk you through the partitioning setup. I usually create multiple partitions, but you might want to just keep it as one since you already have a back up harddrive.

Create your primary partition, allocate all the space to it, then exit fdisk and type in FORMAT C: (your new drive should be C. After formatting, you should be able to install Windows from the CD-Rom drive. Just type in E: or whatever letter your CD-Rom drive is and then type in SETUP.exe.

After installing, in Windows Explorer just transfer anything you need from the old drive to the new drive and format the older one.

 

[dcdomain]

I used to recommend Maxtor's utility too, but EZ-BIOS has caused me some problems before (you can get around it, but I prefer no problems). By the way, Maxtor's utility installs EZ-BIOS...

 

[wave]

The best way is to clone your new hard drive from the old using Symantec's (Norton Ghost ) . You can download the trial version of this program from Symantec's website . This software has been used to clone hundreds of PC's in a enterprise
enviroment, plus it is easy to use .

Norton Ghost

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