Hard Drive Cloning+ZeroFill

[Mr.Ferrari]

Out of curiousity. Well i have a 160g seagate (check sig) and in the future i want to add a 250g sata with 16mb buffer. But i want that to be my boot drive. From what i understand i use the cloning program that came with the hard drive and clone it. But this is where im stumped. After i succesfully clone the hard drive, and then i would like to erase (or zero fill) the seagate and make it slave. Now how would i go about doing that? If the seagate already has the os on it and i boot it up with 2 hard drives both wiht the same OS..wont there be a conflict?

Should i go ahead and boot with both drives having the OS on each and do zero-fill or what? Or is there another way. Im pretty much clueless about this.

[glc]

Clone the drive, then disconnect the IDE drive, boot to the new drive. Then shut down, reconnect the IDE drive, make sure the SATA drive is set to boot first in the bios, boot it up, make SURE the SATA drive is still drive C, and reformat the IDE drive. Zero fill not necessary, just do a quick format.

I would advise you declock everything to stock while doing these operations to prevent possible errors.

[Mr.Ferrari]

What would be the best way to format it? From disk manager? I also have partition magic too..though i really havent used it.

[EzyStvy]

You can partition it and defrag it all from Disk Mgmt.

[glc]

Actually, you can do it in My Computer if it shows up in there as a lettered drive. Just right click on it and select Format. However, XP may come up and want you to write a signature to the drive first - if so, let it, just do not convert it to a dynamic disk.

I do not like using Partition Magic for things that native OS tools can do. Keep it for doing advanced operations such as partition resizing and merging.