I need some hard drive help

[Chip]

In my other thread, i said i ordered a new DELL with a 30 gig HD. I think i made a mistake and want to upgrade the HD to a 120 Western Digital Caviar w/8 meg cache.
Here's the question: Can i just install a second HD ? What's involved with doing this and would this be what i've heard called a "duel boot system" ? I've got a upgrade copy of XP Pro too even though the machine i've got coming tommorrow has XP Home edition installed. Should i go this route because i found the 120 gig Western Digital HD w/8 meg cache on Newegg.com alot cheaper ! I could use the 30 gig drive for all my pictures i D/L or vise versa. What do you guys think ?
Thanks.




Chip Engle


"Concrete ain't a spectator sport"


<a href="http://www.htguide.com/bilder/index.cfm?fuseaction=arkivbilder&userid=0&selected userid=336" target="_blank">My HT

[Bing Fung]

Hey Chip, well asuming the Dell has 2 IDE channels (which it most likely has) all you have to do is plug in the 120Gb western digital drive and away you go.

Open up the Dell and have a look at the board when it arrives. You should have 2 of these connectors (they may not be this particular color). These are the IDE ports.



Now hopefully Dell has placed the CD rom and the hard drive on separate channels. If they did, you can then set your new 120gb hardrive to Slave and connect it up to the slave connector on exisiting hard drives ribbon cable. Each IDE channels will support 2 separate drives be it a harddrive or CD ROM

Generally you want to keep your hard drives on different channels than your CD-ROMs for the data transfer speeds typically slow down to the slowest speed rating on the channel. The reasoning is CD-Rom transfer speeds are much slower than a harddrives.

If you buy a retail harddrive it will come with a complete set of instructions for hooking it up. If you bought an OEM drive it comes with nothing but the drive.

A dual boot system is when you have two different operating systems (ie Windows XP/Windows 98 )on the same PC. They can be on separate drives or on the same drive but different partitions. So in answer to you question, no you will not have a dual boot system if all you do is plug in your new drive. You will however have a dual boot system if you install Windows XP Pro on the new drive, but I wouldn't do that.

What I would recommend is to just plug the new drive in to the same ribbon cord that the current hard drive is on and use it as a second drive. The western digital drive is a very fast drive and if it was me, I would just reinstall the whole OS on that drive and use the 30GB drive as a secondary drive, however I don't think you should attempt that at this point.

Once the drive is installed, boot your PC and press what ever Key Dell requires to load the BIOS (Delete, F2 or something like that) go to IDE devices and set each channel to Auto detect, your should see both your hard drives listed there as well as your CD ROM, then save and exit the program and let windows load. Once Windows has started, the drive will be recognized and installed. You will then have to go to file explorer and then format the drive, or use Administration tools in control panel.

Have a look at these links...

http://www.webtechgeek.com/center-Frame-installing-a-drive.htm

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/howto/install_xp_disk_mgmt.html

And Here

Once you get your PC and HD, come back here and we'll walk you through it.. It'll be easy




Bing

[Chip]

Thank you Bing. I should get the PC today. When it arrives, i'll pop it open and have a look for the two connectors. I'm not positive as to what i exactly want to do yet. I know i'll most likly want to get rid of all the junk they load. Buying a second HD and making it another recognized drive does sound appealing.




Chip Engle


"Concrete ain't a spectator sport"


<a href="http://www.htguide.com/bilder/index.cfm?fuseaction=arkivbilder&userid=0&selected userid=336" target="_blank">My HT

[JonMarsh]

Another possibility to consider, depending on your expansion connector issues, Chip, would be to get a copy of Drive Copy (from PowerQuest), and Klone your first HD to the new one; it will boot, have all the same settings and stuff, but be automatically expanded to use the new available hard disk space. I've done this many times, where I want an upgrade, and may be passing down the smaller disk to my duaghter's system or someone else who can use the upgrade for their system.

Bing's totally on the money; you don't ever want to combine HD's and optical drives on the same bus; the throughput will drop to that of the slowest drive. This is one reason I've been fond of the aftermarket MB's from MSI, ASUSTEK, etc, which often combine a standard IDE controller with a Raid IDE with two more channels; these don't have to be used for RAID, and can be usually used as additional IDE channels; pretty useful if you have DVD, CDRW, Magneto Optical, and HD's all on the same system. Makes it easy to keep them separate on their own busses.

Best regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[Chip]

Looks interesting Jon! It doesn't list XP as an operating system ? I'll be using XP. Because it lists Windows 2000, does that mean it'll work with XP & XP Pro ?

http://www.powerquest.com/drivecopy/

Efficiently upgrade to a new hard drive
Copy speeds of up to 300 MB per minute
Exceptional ease of use
Comprehensive file system support




$49.95 USD


The safe, easy affordable way to copy everything from your old hard drive to your new hard drive.
Make hard drive upgrades easy.
There was a time when upgrading to a new hard drive meant hours of downloading your data, applications, and operating systems to disk; then hours more of reinstalling everything to your new hard drive. If it all went well, you could be looking at a few days worth of work. Of course, there was always the risk of scrambling your data or losing it altogether in the process. Fortunately, now there's DriveCopy from PowerQuest.

With PowerQuest DriveCopy, you can create an exact copy of your old disk, including the operating system, applications, preferences, settings, and data, and then you can quickly put the image onto your new hard drive. So you don't have to worry about losing your data, applications and settings. And, with DriveCopy's easy-to-use wizard interface, you can perform the entire process in 10 easy steps.

Supports Major Operating System Platforms
DriveCopy supports all of the popular operating systems and the file systems they use.


Windows 2000 Professional
Windows Me
Windows 95/98
Windows NT
Windows 3.1
DOS
Linux ext 2




Chip Engle


"Concrete ain't a spectator sport"


<a href="http://www.htguide.com/bilder/index.cfm?fuseaction=arkivbilder&userid=0&selected userid=336" target="_blank">My HT

[Gordon Moore]

Chip,

from powerquest's faq...

Q: Does DriveCopy 4.0 support Windows XP? Does it support the NTFS file system?
A: DriveCopy 4.0 does not support Windows XP. It does however support cloning NTFS partitions or drives. DriveCopy 4.0 supports Windows 95, 98, 98SE, and Me. It also supports Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 Professional.

here: http://www.powerquest.com/drivecopy/dcfaq.cfm

So it's a no go with that program. You could however use a competing product...Symantec's Ghost:

Platforms: Windows®
XP Home/XP Pro/2000 Pro/NT WS/Me/98

System Requirements

Windows® XP/2000/NT WS/Me/98

486 or higher processor
16 MB RAM (32 MB RAM recommended)
50 MB hard disk space available
Microsoft ®-compatible mouse recommended
Workstation v4.0 with Service Pack 6a for Windows NT
Internet Explorer (minimum version 5.0 required)
File systems supported for backup, restore, and cloning tasks:

All FAT
ALL NTFS
Linux EXT2/3


Read about here:

http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/

"A RONSTER!"

[NChard]

Chip

You might want to wait to look at your motherboard specifications before you purchase a new hard drive. Parrallel IDE's come in 66, 100. 133 speeds. Your channels might not support your new drive. Judging by the capacity of the drive your computer comes with it may only work with 66, 100 mbs speeds. Deals on hard drives are numerous. Jazztechnology.com, directron.com are reliable. Also the specifications are important. Don't just look at capacity. Seek time, rpm, and data transfer speeds are all important for speed. I has 8m buffer so that is good. 8.9 seek, 7200 rpm, at least 100 mbs are all fairly standard but read the specifications.

[ThomasW]

Gee I'm glad I didn't read the PowerQuest FAQ, because I've successfully been using DriveCopy 4.0 to clone complete XP-Pro installs for years........ :T

[Ten 99]

Interesting. This is a tool I could use. I tried the link further up in this old resurrected thread. Apparently, Powerquest was acquired by Symantec. It doesn't appear that Drive Copy is available anymore. I found some copies on Ebay, but some of the info on there says it supports drives only up to 80GB. Hmmm....

[ThomasW]

Primarily I've used DC 4.0 on 80 gig drives, since I use that size most frequently for my OS installs. However I have used it twice with 160 gig drives.

I know it doesn't work with SATA drives