[Home] Hard Drive Installation

[pipercub]

My brother wanted to install a new hard drive in his computer with XP and had never done it before. Neither had I so I did a "search" and there it was...
an answer from "SuperSparks"!! I sent him the instructions and he now has one working new hard drive. Thanks for the help and Merry Christmas!

[SuperSparks]

I'm very glad that my answer helped

Merry Christmas to you too

[DagDog]

I always find it confusing whether to start a new thread or reply.
I'm sure I will be directed accordingly, LOL.

Okay, Santa brought a new larger hard drive for Xmas. I had only 12 or 13 per cent free space on it. The new drive is double capacity the old. Now its installed and its working nicely side by side with my old drive. Infact, I have used Disc Wizard from Seagate to copy/duplicate old to new. And PC boots off of the new drive.

Okay. The plan is this. old drive is 80gigs. New is 160 gigs. I planned to copy move my OS and all my filed onto the larger 160gig, then format (clean erase) the old drive, and use it for storage, mainly my large music collection.

I was about to proceed with that. But some research indicates its not as simple as copy and paste, configure and your good to go.

So. All hardware is installed, all is working and cooperating. But I'm essentially working off of the old drive, with the other new drive, the slave drive, just humming along, waiting.

Is it safe to proceed and switch to the new drive, boot off it, and reformat the old to use as simply a storage drive (music)?

Any precautions?

I have xp sp2. 2.5ghz celeron cpu . 512 ram. new drive is a seagate barracuda 7200.p, 160gb, . Old drive/current drive is seagate u series 980012, 80 gb. COMPAQ PRESARIO S4100NX.

[Train]

I sure hope you have other bakups, like cds or dvds. Believe me, anything can cause data loss off a hdd.

For a test, make the Large hdd the master and leave the Smaller completely disconnected.



If you can boot up to it you are good to go.

After checking things out and happy with things, shut down and hookup the smaller but be sure to jumper it as slave.
Now you can boot up and go into disk management a format that drive if you wish.

[DagDog]

I sure hope you have other bakups, like cds or dvds. Believe me, anything can cause data loss off a hdd.

For a test, make the Large hdd the master and leave the Smaller completely disconnected.



If you can boot up to it you are good to go.

After checking things out and happy with things, shut down and hookup the smaller but be sure to jumper it as slave.
Now you can boot up and go into disk management a format that drive if you wish.

Thanks...I will do that this evening. Let u know. And thanks... for your friendly answer. Nice. LOL.

[Train]

You welcome!

[DagDog]

Hi..
Okay I followed your instructions. Unplugged the old drive so it was dead. And moved the pin/pumper to set the new hard drive to master with no slave. Didnt boot up. Flashing Prompt. I check in setup, and enabled and disabled. Still wouldnt load windows. So. I put jumpers back to cable select on both. And it booted. Windows loaded (and faster). But I am not sure which drive it loaded windows from. Both drives show. But one tuneup software program says drive is not accessible (meaning drive F, the new one). And When I go to open the new drive in my computer, I get a drive is not formatted error, do u want to format it now. I closed off.

So..now I am a little mystified. Any suggestions.

[Train]

Good thing you did not do anything to the old drive. Yes you are booting from it.

Now I have not used the diskwizard for years. But did you make the new hdd primary/bootable when you used it.

[DagDog]

Hello
Thanks for helping.
Yeah, its primary master, and the old drive is primary slave.
And I tried all the configuration changes in setup.
I positioned it to be 1st to boot. Even disabled the other drive(set to none from auto). But same results.

How come now ... Im getting this drive not formatted and/or inaccessible message? Where as before it showed as another disc drive (f) and I could see a duplication of all the programs files folders from my original drive, drive C listed.

The seagate disk wizard must have done its job of copying. Gawd it only took like 13 or 14 hours. LOL.

Now regarding this ... according to other forums and Seagates support faq's - I wonder if this isnt the problem. U cant just do a copy and paste thing. Perhaps this link might give u more insight into the issue and perhaps resolution. http://www.seagate.com/support/seato...old_usage.html

Oh I downloaded that file, but havent burnt it to disk or done anything with it - yet!

Now I did do a little further troubleshooting. I used this link for the troubleshooting steps:
http://www.seagate.com/support/ts/ata/yes.html

Now in Computer Management>Disk Management>Storage.
I see both drives. C is well C and listed as device 1, healthy, NTFS etc.
New drive is listed as Primary. As disc 0/F, with 31.5gb of the 160bg, and no fat32 or NTFS. So looks like its not formatted. LOL.
I followed the troubleshooting to the end, where it suggests downloading the diskwizard etc. '

I didnt do that, as I have the disk wizard. And the options will again ask me what i want to do. Install a new drive, install new on existing, use for storage etc. BUT THIS IS WHERE I WAS TWO, THREE DAYS AGO. It went through and copied my c to f in 14 hours. however...no can boot fromit. Ahhhh! LOL

If it looks like a lot of work, reconfiguring and stuff. I can live with running off the old drive, and using the new drive as storage, as slave. I can load my music onto the new drive. It should free up two thirds of whats on the old drive, lol.

So..I await your learned suggestions.
Thanks

[Train]

Run the diagnostic part of seatools on that drive and see what it says. Run the full test at that. Let us see what it says about that drive as it would not be the first hdd that I saw was bad out of the box.

Now if everything comes out OK with the test, then:
If you want to use it as C:\ drive. I suggest starting from scratch.

For a slave drive, just use disk management.

How to use Disk Management to configure basic disks in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309000

I normally use a smaller hdd as my boot drive. Less to lose if it goes belly up.

[DagDog]

thanks again.
will do the tests and see what happens.
dave