New hard drive

[redvette]

Hi Gang

Thought I would start another thread here. I thank every one for all their good advice, they gave me on my other problem.

Have the new hard drive, WD 120gb. Does any one have a simple way of transferring all there stuff from one hard drive to another. I know there are gadgets you can buy to do this with, but is there a smooth way of dumbing it on a disk, and then transferring it to the new drive. I have been told you can do this very simply with a controller, with the right program.

I know all these large Co's have a way of doing this when they have a problem with a particular computer, so I am open to any good ideas here, the simpler the better. Some of the ways I have seen suggested seem like so much hit and miss. I am sure all of you are like me, every last stinking thing that is on my old drive, I just have to have on my new one...:D

Take care........Gunny

[bailey]

not giving any info on the O/S that you are useing, the instructions that came with the drive is the best way to do it, and the software that came with it does a decent job of doing it for ypu.

unless of coures you got the oem drive that came with nothing.
then you can download the software from there web site.
they give you a step by step instructions for doing it.

[redvette]

Hi Bailey

Sorry I thought I was still on my other thread. Buy the way this is a boxed HD with the floppy.

I have a PC100, Pent lll that GLC thinks its a "Yugo" ;-) 550mh, IE 6.0 and 512 memory. I have a burner, floppy drive, CDrom. The hard drive(the old one) is very small, so I am upgrading you might say. Eventually going to get a better Mother board, and a Pent iv, but now just wanting to swap info from one HD to another.

Take care.......Gunny...........

:confused: :confused:

[bailey]

just use the floppy and it will give you the step by step instructions.

also the paper will step you through it as to how to connect the drive for the copy process

[redvette]

Hi Bailey

I am going to start doing the swap in a few minutes, I was just glancing over the paper work and it suggested a way with using a controller card. That is the only reason I mentioned it. I don't have a controller card, but I have an open PCI slot though. I understand they are not that expensive to buy, $10 $15 bucks.

Take care.........Gunny

[bailey]

most of thoes larger drives came with a controler card and I used it in my systems, it freed up the ports on the motherboard for the optical drives

but if you don't have one use the other method, just be sure you reread the steps several times to be sure you doing the correct one, it can be confuseing at first.

[glc]

You *WILL* need a controller card unless you install the EZ-Bios overlay from the drive install disk, which is NOT a good way to do it, these bios overlays are notoriously unstable.

[Cissy]

Hi!
I am Redvette's (Gunny) other half :). He cannot get online right now because we are still "trying" to copy from his old hard drive to new one. Ok, here's question:

During the copy process, about 60% was done, we got an error message saying it needed to be tested and/or repaired. We did the test. Result: No errors found (geeze). BUT, there was no option to resume copying process. Instead, the only option was to reboot system. That resulted in the new hard drive still not being copied to. Also, the current harddrive has some bad clusters in it. It seems this is the area that we get errors on during the copying process (just guessing about that). Could that be a problem?

Also, the WD harddrive did not come with controller since the drive is 120GB with does not exceed 137GB (controller card needed for that size and bigger). His two drives combined are still under the 137GB.

Anyway, should we burn off the hard drive to a CD, install/format the new hard drive and use the burned CD to put data/information onto the new harddrive? All because we have no controller card?

Thanks in advance

[Cissy]

I think I will respond to my own post LOL. I decided to enter the BIOS figures for the new hard drive as User and put in numbers manually according to direction....cyl, heads, etc. This fooled the computer into thinking the hard drive is smaller than it actually is. However, the OLD hard drive is another story. The numbers are from manufacturer. I wonder if I changed the numbers to be the same as new hard drive, thus making that drive look even smaller?

Anyhow, we about to give up on transfering storage from old hard drive to new drive this way. I think we will put Win 98 onto new hard drive. We'll do this by removing OLD harddrive and just connecting new on by itself as a single. Right now, they are configured as old hard drive as Master and new drive as Slave.

This is tiring process and we have spent the entire day working on same thing over and over. I guess the new hard drive must be configured as single or master to use boot up disk for installing Win98, correct? Otherwise, I have no way of booting up new hardrive if configured as SLAVE..

::thud:::(

[Cissy]

Ok ok ok ok..... :eek: We used disk that came with new hard drive to partition and install it. Fine. When we went to install windows, it did the scan ...yada yada yada. We used a boot up disk for Win98SE, our OS. When it comes to "initializing sytem.....scanning registry, it hangs for a long time (doing that now). Is it normal to hang for so long? Is it because it's a 120GB hard drive being used on our sorry PCChips motherboard? :rolleyes:

<sigh>..or rather grrrrrrrrrrrr :mad:

Thanks!

[glc]

1. Windows 98 needs a FDISK patch to properly set up a drive larger than 64gb. You can download the patch from Microsoft and update your system - then replace the fdisk.exe file on your bootdisk with the new one.

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q263/0/44.ASP

2. Using the WD install disk will install a bios overlay on the drive (because the PC Chips bios has a 32gb limit), which is not a good way to do things. You NEED a controller card. Then you can use the modified Win98 bootdisk to partition and format the drive prior to installing Windows.

3. With bad sectors on the source drive, a cloning operation with Lifeguard will likely fail, as you have seen.

4. WD drives have a unique jumpering scheme - if it's a standalone drive, the jumper must be removed - the "master" position only works with a slave drive present. Your retail boxed drive may have come with an IDE cable - and controller cards may come with one too. These new cables are 80 wire - they look a lot finer than the old 40 wire cables - and they are color coded and designed to be used with the "cable select" (CS) jumper position. The blue end goes on the controller (or the motherboard if you are not using a card), the black end is the master end, and the gray in the middle is the slave position.

I would advise you to do the following:

Go buy a controller card - my recommended brand is Promise. Newegg.com sells the Promise Ultra 100TX2 retail box for $30, free shipping. It comes with a manual, driver disk, and a new 80 wire cable. Remove all hard drives from the computer and install the card. Put the new drive on the primary channel of the card, jumpered to Cable Select using the new cable, and connected to the black "master" end. Boot with your modified Win98 startup disk, run FDISK, partition and format the drive, and install Windows 98. Install the controller driver in Windows along with the rest of the needed drivers for the other components. Set the bios to boot from SCSI first, the controller card will be seen as a SCSI device by the bios. Shut down and reinstall the old drive, you can either put it on the secondary card channel or the primary motherboard channel, just jumper it correctly for the position and type cable you are using. Boot it back up and copy the files you need from the old drive to the new one using copy/paste or drag/drop in Windows Explorer. Shut down and remove the old drive, boot it back up, and reinstall all your applications.

[Cissy]

GLC....................I cannot tell you how much you are appreciated.....all of you are that helped us so much. The above written instructions have been saved to a floppy so it's not wasted. I also downloaded and put onto floppy the FDISK "fix".

Last night, 13 hours later, we are up and running with the new harddrive. We just installed all the stuff over again rather than copying from old drive. Too many problems and no controller card.

Your advice is perfect, but alas we cannot use it now. However, for the future, we'll know what to do if we need to do this again with Gunny's computer.

One of these days, he's going to replace the whole thing by building one himself. You guys helped me awhile back when building mine.

Thanks so much!! You and others here and certainly a godsend :)

[redvette]

Hi To all

I second to what Cissy said, you all have been a great help. We try to not ask for any help if possible. But there are just some times that things just don't go right, and rather then cause more problems, we go for help. We have learned so much from this site, and I promise you we will not forget it.

One question I still have is this, say I went and got a controller card, and attempted the same thing. Do you think it would have a better chance of going through correctly, even though the old drive had bad sectors, or do you think even that way would have given us problems?

The reason I am asking this is because if you think the controller card would have been the better way to go, then I am going to get one, because I am sure I am going to be doing this again.

And also if you run all the info off the old onto the new, does this mean the bad sectors goes along with it. This makes two HD's that I have now with bad sectors on them, both of them are small and old, so this was the reason I replaced them.

Take care.......Gunny.......

[glc]

No, the bad sectors won't transfer, but any information stored in the bad sectors won't come over, possibly causing file system or OS problems. I've never had any luck with cloning utilities from a bad drive anyway.

The controller card would have been a better way to go because it doesn't require the EZ-Bios overlay, but if you have it up and running now, I'd leave it alone till you build a new system - which won't need a controller card.

[Ang88]

couldn't he just use xcopy to copy all the files from his first hd to his new one (after formating and partioning)

[redvette]

Hi Ang88

What is this xcopy? Is this a program that helps you move things from one HD to another?

GLC-- Yes I am going to leave well enough alone. It was a battle but we can say we beat it. Took us far longer then one of you smarties. :) I think I may still pick up one of these cards. Never can tell what we may decide to do tomorrow. :) Now that we have learned all this new stuff, we feel a need to use it. :) No telling where we will pop up on this PC forum. What is so frustrating to some, is a piece of cake to others.

Take care...........Gunny

[glc]

xcopy is a way to copy files at a command prompt instead of dragging and dropping with Explorer. Win98 requires xcopy32 - plain old xcopy kills long file names. It's a holdover from the DOS days. With Win2K and XP, xcopy preserves long file names.