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Upgrading hard drive; reinstalling OS's

C

Chain777

Senior member
😕

I'm about to upgrade one of the hard drives on my system, and want to know the best way to do this; hopefully without having to reinstall all the software and hardware/drivers. If that's the only way, fine. But if there is another way (Norton Ghost maybe?), let me know. I've gone through the format/reinstall/upgrade/reinstall software; etc. Hoping I can avoid this...again. Anyway, if you can't tell from my sig, I'm running a Win98se/WinXPpro dual boot on two sepatate hard drives. The one with 98se is the one that's going to be replaced (30GB to 80GB), and has all the critical files (C: drive) I need to run the dual boot system. I know I need to keep all these files to run either OS, so I'm just asking the best way to go about this?

*also as a side note. I have the C: drive (98se) formatted to FAT32 and the D: drive (WinXPpro) to NTFS. Is this going to cause a problem? And finally, do you think it's a good idea to create separate small partitions for the OS's only. (I'm only thinking this might be a good idea for an application just like mine. I could just format the partition and reintall the OS, right).

Sorry if there's too many questions, any help or direction would be appreciated.

thank you for any reply's.
 
You don't say what brand the new drive is. I know IBM, Maxtor and WD have utilities available on their sites that will help you format, partition and transfer the data from an old drive to a new drive. Other manufacturers may also have this capability.
 
When I got a WDC drive (retail drive but from an online seller) about 2 years ago it came with a utility that basically copied your old drive to your new drive and it worked perfectly. I know you have the added complication of dual boot and the boot files but something like that should work since it basically clones your drive. Whether WDC still includes that utility I don't know. In any the WDC800BB is the performance leader for 80GB drives.

I haven't used either Norton Ghost or Power Quest's utility to create an image before so I can't say anything about that option. But probably you can dump a clone of your entire 30GB drive onto a partition of your new 80GB drive and then recreate your old drive on the first partition of your new drive. Maybe someone who has used either program can fill you in on the details. In the meantime you can look at the product claims/faqs of both products on their websites. But sometimes the answers there are more geared to corporate users who need to deploy images across multiple machines.
 
Sorry for not mentioning it, but it's a Maxtor 80GB 7200 133 (D740X-6L) drive.

So I guess from what I'm hearing, it's best to just use the software that came with the drive???

What about partitioning? Would it be to my advantage to put the OS's on separate partions; just for the ease of upgrading/reinstalling in the future?

Thank you all for the replies.
 
RE: Partitions-

Everyone has their own ideas as to what is best.

My main drive is 30gigs: C: = 1g - Win98SE, D: = 3.5g - XP-Pro, remainder is divided up to give me a mirror of C: & D: plus storage for all my other data and a separate partition for a swapfile.
 
Yes, everyone has their own ideas about partitions. Actually I have a similar setup to Woodie1, the only difference is that I have a swapfile for each OS and they each reside on the same partition as the OS. If there is one piece of advice I believe in it is to put your OS in a seperate partition.

That has saved my life on so many occasions that I would recommend that to anyone. When you have your data (MP3s, documents, movies, mail archives etc.) in a seperate partition, you can recover from the inevitable OS problems that tend to happen every now and then. It so often happens that an OS reinstall is the cleanest solution to a problem, with the OS in a seperate partition you can always reinstall your OS and keep your data. It is even more helpful if you can't boot into your OS (I know you have dual boot, but what if your Win98 SE installation/files take a dive? Then the whole dual boot becomes inoperable as far as I know*), then you can run an installation from DOS and not worry about losing data since only your OS partition will be overwritten and your data safe.




*My partition with Win98 became corrupt and I couldn't boot into either OS recently. I tried the Partition Magic DOS utilities to get it boot from my Win2k drive but it wouldn't. I don't know how and if there is a way to recover from this situation short of reinstalling both OSes. There probably is a way but I don't know enough about the Win 2k bootloader (which is a big pain in the a$$ to understand and work with).
 
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