Replacing Hard Drive

[asm481]

I have the task of replacing a friends hard drive tonight. The original drive is working ok, just to small-1.2 GB he says. He has purchased a new 60GB drive and I am wondering if there is a way to copy the entire contents of his old drive to the new to avoid having to reinstall all his programs, bookmarks, IPS info, address book etc.

[NooNoo]

Norton Ghost...

BUT

He has a small hard drive and you want to replace it with a big hard drive, don't be surprised if the bios does not recognise the drive at all, or if it does, says it is only 8.4 gig or 32 gig.

BEFORE you attempt this, you should get the motherboard manual and find out what the bios is capable of accepting in the way of hard drive size, and what bios flashes are available to overcome this problem. Having said that, you may end up using a drive overlay, which fools the bios... or you can buy a pci ide controller (promise or some such) and let the pci card handle it.

Whichever way you go, you have some research to do before you go swapping out the drive.

[kato2274]

get the manufacture's set up disks.

if he's going from 1.2 to 60GB be prepared to install the drive overlay software or purchase him a $20-$30 PCI IDE controller card.

[NooNoo]

Bios overlay though should always be the last resort.

[asm481]

I am aware of possible bios problems but doubt that is a concern here. The 1.2GB drive was a replace for a larger drive that went south. He is obviously not happy with the tech that did this for him as he didn't know anything except this guy put in a used drive and didn't charge him much! All I know right now is it is a PIII system. Is there a free or trial version of Norton Ghost or do I cough up some bread?

[kato2274]

Originally posted by asm481
I am aware of possible bios problems but doubt that is a concern here. The 1.2GB drive was a replace for a larger drive that went south. He is obviously not happy with the tech that did this for him as he didn't know anything except this guy put in a used drive and didn't charge him much! All I know right now is it is a PIII system. Is there a free or trial version of Norton Ghost or do I cough up some bread?

I don't think there is a free trial for ghost. the manufacture's setup disks will do everything you need to do including copying the entire drive contents to another drive. . . . . . and it's free.

[meatwad]

1. Don't use a DDO. REALLY is not worth it. Tell him to spend the cash to put the PCI IDE card. This is especially a good idea if the board doesn't support ATA100.

2. What OS is the system? If it's not NTFS, just connect both drives, boot to the one with the OS already on it, open a command prompt window and use

xcopy32 [source drive letter] [destination drive letter] /s/e/c/h/y/k/r

It's free and it works.

[asm481]

does XCOPY copy all info such as boot sector?

[meatwad]

Ayuh. It sure does.

[Platypus]

Originally posted by asm481
does XCOPY copy all info such as boot sector?

Well, no actually, it won't copy the boot sector, the drive will need to be partitioned and formatted first. But it will copy all the necessary files, you won't need to use the /S switch with FORMAT, or SYS the drive (unless it gets a bit cranky and won't boot off the new drive).

[asm481]

Well guys, and gals, just want to let you know what became of this swap. I opened up the tower and found the previous tech who replaced this dead hard drive with this pitiful small thing had the HD as a slave to the CDROM on the second IDE channel! Nothing was on the primary ID! Saved a nickel on another IDE cable I guess. He must have used a third party program to install the system on here as DOS didn't recognize it or let me copy. (The system was WIN98) Not to bad a deal as he had plenty of errors that I would have had to fix. So the end is I have it up and running a ton faster and error free with all his programs loaded right. Is it a common practice to set a HD as slave to a CDROM on the secondary IDE?

[emr]

Originally posted by asm481
Is it a common practice to set a HD as slave to a CDROM on the secondary IDE?

Certainly not in my common practices and I don't think it should be for any tech. Just doesn't make logical sense.

Obviously if it is a secondary drive then ok, but not for the primary.

emr

[cookin chef]

Whoever did that was very unprofessional. It may not necessarily harm anything, but it is just better to have the hd set as master on the primary ide and the cdrom as master on the secondary ide.

But unless absolutely necessary, if there is only one ide cable available, then it is okay to slave the cdrom to the hd on the primary ide.