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updating harddrive, how to move all the data? "new problems!"

T

tjr2mental

Member
Ok, I wish to take the data that I have on my old slow hard drive and move it to the new hard drive that I just bought. I know that I can use ghost to do this, but how do I go about renameing this drive as c:?

I will have three hard drives total, and the new one that I got is 120 gigs, so I figure that I can run this one on a ata card that came with my 180 gig drive. Will that be a problem, or will I have to put the old drive on the ata card, and have the new drive placed where the old drive was as a master? If I do place them like this, will I have any problems ghosting the drives?

 
windows will see whichever has the OS as C:, personally depending on the last time you installed everything I would start from scratch anyways though and just transfer files.
 
Originally posted by: Turkey22
windows will see whichever has the OS as C:, personally depending on the last time you installed everything I would start from scratch anyways though and just transfer files.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure you are incorrect. The proper way will be to move the existing C: drive and set it as a slave, with the new drive as the master drive. Ghost the partition over to the new drive, which by default will be set to C: via the BIOS. Make sure you fdisk the old drive as you will have two active partitions fighting each other.

That should take care of it.

EDIT: depending on the version of Windows, you can set your boot partition to a drive other than C:, but the 1st IDE drive will be listed as C: by default. There ARE ways to change drive letters on Win NT, 2k and XP, but that is a lot of hassle that you really don't want to address if you are asking how to install the new drive in the first place.
 
Changing the drives to boot off of the ata card is going to screw things up if your running win2k/xp. The boot.ini tells the OS to look for the system files on a particular ide/scsi channel, hard drive, and partition on that drive. Ghost will copy the drive exact, and if you put it back in the same spot on the ide chain, it will boot with no issues. Even if you put the old drive somewhere in the system without reformatting it, as long as the new drive is in the same boot position as the old one came from, it would boot. It's a big can of worms to mess with the boot drive position.
 
Well, I tried the ghost thing after reading Turkey22's post, but it didn't seem to work for me so I made a backup of the old c: drive using windows. Then I had that backup placed on the new hard drive. Thinking that everything would be fine at this point, I loaded the c: drive once more, opened up partition magic and changed the drive letters so that the drive that was called I: would now be called C:, and the drive that was called C: would be called I:. Partition magic started to do its thing, automaticly restarting the pc when it had to and I thought all was well. Once this was finished, I placed the new drive in the spot where the old C: drive had been, being sure to set the jumpers to read as master and rebooted the pc. It came up with a error about a batch file for partition magic that could not be found then it and stopped loading windows.

Figuring that if I placed the old c: drive back in the master spot it would read it as c: instead of I: I would be where I started off, I did that. It will go no further then looking for the CMD or some such thing. Argh!

So, I did what any moron would do, and took off the old c: drive, and reformated the new drive using the old pc that we have. I then just tried to load windows XP to that drive but all it does is tell me to select f6 to load some drivers for raid, and if I do not select that it automaticly starts to try to repair windows. What is there to repair? How do I get it to just install windows to this drive? I have gone into the bios and set it to read form my cd drive first, and when I restart after saving the changes it does the same thing. I never get the option to load a new copy of windows to the drive.

What do I do now? Argh!
 
New problem.. it seems that the startup screen (where it shows what is going on when you first start the pc) does not show up all the time when I try to restart the computer. If I power off the pc using the switch on the power supply it will sometimes show the pc starting on the moniter.

Could the cause of my problem (not being able to load windows into the new hard drive) be related to this some how?

When the pc starts to load windows from the XP disk, it gets to the part where it says "starting windows" and then it goes back to the startup menu, and lists the video card, but then just stops if that info helps at all.
 
This may not be helpful but i found this method to be easier when migrating to a new drive. First I install the new drive with a fresh OS. Then I use PC relocator to transfer all the data to the new os. Now i have a clean install os and the progs that I wanted.

I use to do this as a tech for windows 9x oses i think pc relocator is still app for the nt kernel as well
 
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