Upgrade

I am going to upgrade my hard drive myself and would like to know any little tricks that might make for a smooth passage. Also could you tell me how to tranfer allmy bits from the old drive to the new one as I would like to get rid of the old one.

Happy days
Richie

Hi Richard,

What OS are you using? If it's XP it has a handy little transfer feature that allows you to maintain all your current settings on your old hard drive to your new.

However for a basic approach does the IDE cable hooked into your hard drive have a second adaptor? If so you could run both hard drives off one cable, which would give you a bit more room with two hard drives to play with. Or failing that you'll need another cable to hook into your Mother board to the new hard drive, but this is dependant on if your motherboard allows for another IDE cable to be connected.

Hope this points you in the right direction.

Cheers,

Daniel

Hi Daniel

Thanks For the advice but the old drive is only 2GB and I want to go up to 40GB but not sure how to transfer my gear to the new drive. I run on 98SE.

Can you Help
Regards
Richie

If either of your drives (new or old) is a Seagate brand, you can download tools from the Seagate site (www.seagate.com), which help you install the new drive and transfer files across.

The best way to do this (not using Ghost which will image both all that is good and all that is bad on your existing drive) fit both drives to the computer (remember to set master/slave if you need to) boot from floppy fdisk and format the new drive boot to existing drive and transfer all files to a folder on your new drive i.e. oldcdrive shutdown the computer set the new drive to master on first IDE boot to floppy and install your original operating system and all software that you use and transfer any files from oldcdrive as you need them while this may seem long winded it is in my opinion the most sfe way of dealing with what you want to do

To clone your old drive onto your new drive boot up with your new drive on slave and then format you?re new drive. Shut down all programs except explorer and systray using clt-alt-del
GO {Start} {Run} type in 'command'.
cd.. cd.. to get to c:\ prompt only then type this in as it is here without the quotations;
'xcopy /h/e/c/k/r/y c: d:' assuming that your old drive is c: and your new drive is d:
When finished, shut down your computer change drives over so that your new drive is on master with the right jumper settings..
You will need a copy of ranish partition manager, which is included with this month?s pc world cd 'may' on ultimate boot disk. You will need to make this before you start doing all this, also make sure that you have a win98 start up disk with sys.com on it.

Reboot and make your new drive partition bootable with a boot flag either through ranish partition manager or win98 fdisk, DON'T change anything else or you will have to start all over again..
Reboot with the start up disk and at the a:\ prompt type sys a: c:
Assuming that your new drive is c: which it should be..
Keep you old drive around until you know that your new drive is working properly..
You can insert your old drive later with a complete back up but just remember to add or remove the boot flag off it with ranish or fdisk.. I use this way to do a complete backup of my system and can format and reload windows in less than ten minutes and have it running properly..Have fun