Copy old hard drive to new....Problem---Help!

[fjoseph1]

I'm trying to swap HD, and I want to copy the data from the old to the new.
The problem is that windows is not recognizing the slave HD even though I've got all the jumpers set. BIOS sees the two drive correctly as slave(new) and master(old). What am I missing or doing wrong. The new drive is formatted and ready to go. Unfortunately, I don't have the start disk for windows.

Thanks again for all of your help.

[DDeRek]

Your post is slightly confusing, fjoseph1. You say the new drive is not being recognized, then you say the BIOS sees both the drives correctly. You need to be more specific and accurate in your information to get a productive response. HTH

[fjoseph1]

Ok, my problem is when I go to copy from old to new disk, Windows only shows the master drive, and there is no drive letter for the slave.

[WJWheels]

How did you format it if you can't see it? It has to have a drive letter to format. (format D:, etc) What did you do to set it up? Fdisk, partitions, etc. I don't think you have it set up correctly to do what you're trying to do.

See Carl Price's method for the proper way to clone a hard drive.

[mike breck]

Hi fjoseph1,

You must partition and format a new HD before using it.

You can find the procedure here

http://www.pcmech.com/byopc/step/25/

Alternatively, you can use the HD manufacturers Utility Floppy to Partition, Format, and Clone HDs. These tend to be much quicker than using a Startup Disk and FDISK.

If you didn't get a Utilty Floppy with your HD, then you can download one from your HD manufacturers Web Site. Just make sure it's the right version for your model of drive. Go by the model number on the HD.

Because you have set the new HD up as a Slave, then that implies you wish to keep the Windows on the old HD and tranfer some data from the old HD to the new one. Is that correct?

If it is, then once the drives are set up, you can drag and drop data from one drive to the other in Windows.

However, if you wish to use the new HD for Windows, then you can clone your existing old drive to the new one using Xcopy or the HD Disk Utlity. However, by doing that you will be tranferring an old, bloated install of Windows onto your new drive. I think it's more sensible to put a new install of Windows on the new drive which will run faster and leaner with less potential inherent problems.

You can then drag and drop data between the drives to please yourself. However, that does mean you will have to reinstall programs and drivers. But that doesn't take very long. A small price to pay for a nice clean install.

HTH

[Guardian]

I've been trying to do the same thing. Problem is all the instructions written so far are for HDD that are NOT using WinXP.

Xcopy32 isn't even available. Also, I'm using Western Digital harddrives and thier clone utility specifically doesn't work with WinXP.

When you attempt to copy files from one drive to another, there are certain files that absolutely will not copy because the systems says they are in use.

I also haven't been able to find a good boot disk that would allow me to keep long file names when I tried to copy at the DOS prompt.

[Carl Price]

There is a program called xxcopy that GLC espouses. Do a Google search for it and download.

You can not copy from a pure DOS prompt. To protect long filenames you must boot to windows and use a dos box under Windows.

quote "When you attempt to copy files from one drive to another, there are certain files that absolutely will not copy because the systems says they are in use." unquote.

Because of this, you can't copy files over a drive that is the boot drive. You can copy those files but not copy over them. That is the reason that you always copy from c to d. The files in the d: drive are not open.

All of this is not useful if your problem with seeing the new harddrive has not been solved. I like to temporarily disconnect the cdrom and make them both masters under different connections. This may work for you.

[brandc]

I have used filecopy successfully w/ W95. Here's a link: http://www.compucheap.com/pages/download2.html
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