[fairywings2005]

Hi all

recently i had some trouble with a trojan, i found this site and joined and was able to find the required fixes by searching through the forums, (thanks for that by the way), but ever since then my system runs very slowly and is driving me mad, anyway i have 2 hard drives, one is a 20G (this one has my OS) the other is 80G, i'm considering wiping out everything and starting again but i want to swap the drives over, is there anything special i need to do or can i just swap them over and put the disc in and that will do it

thanks in advance for any help

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Welcome to Geeks to Go!, Fairywings2005.

I would hope you have all the data you wanted to save backed up on cd's or dvd's. Since it sounds like you want to swap the 80 gig drive in as the "C" drive i would make sure the drive is clean(no data). You also sound like you don't mind reinstalling all your software to the new "C" drive. You have not mentioned if you have the Microsoft cd for installing or a recovery CD. You may not be able to use a recovery cd to install on a different drive. You can reuse the 20 Gig drive as a slave to the 80 Gig drive by changing a jumper and moving the data cable connection to the middle connector. You do not need to wipe the 20 gig drive and can move data to the 80 giger later. Although the 20 gig will have a active partition as slave it still won't try booting up in the OS. If you have data on the 80 Giger, and if you have room on the 20 giger you can move data to the 20 and then after making the 20 giger the slave drive, move the data back to the 80 giger.

There are jumpers in the back of the drives where you can set the drives as Master, Slave, or Cable Select. On most new drives setting the jumper to CS(Cable Select) will let XP decide what the drives is. By putting the end of the data cable to the 80 gig drive it will be designated as the main "C" drive and any other drive that is hooked to the middle connector on the cable will be the slave drive. The drive letter can vary according to how the operating system was installed. If the slave drive is installed after installing the Operating system, it will usually be the "E" or later drive letter. If the slave drive is installed before the OS is installed it will be the "D" drive and any cdrom, or dvd drives will be the "E" or later drives.

I just tried an experment with Paragon Drive Copy 8.0 where i had 6.2 gigs on a 20 gig HD that i wanted to move to a larger drive. I used drive copy 8 to move the whole operating system to a 160 gig HD. In about 30 minutes i had Successfully moved the whole XP operating system with all the programs i had installed over to the 160 G drive. The first time i rebooted the computer after the transfer it booted into safe mode (which did surprise me) but i picked to boot into normal mode and it then booted into XP normally. All the programs work that i have tried so far and there seems to be no problems with the transfer to the new drive. At a price of $25 i do think this is a cheap method to move the operating system to a newer larger drive. It is just a thought as i know it can take days to get a new reinstall of windows like you want it.

I hope this is not too much information for you. It is not hard to do this kind of swap. You just need to know the procedure so everything comes out like you would like it.

Heres a Drive Copy link.

http://www.drive-copy.de/eng/eshop.htm

Any other questions you have please ask as the more knowledge you have the easier it will be. Perhaps this could evolve into a good tutorial on swaping to a larger HD.

SRX660

Edited by SRX660, 18 November 2006 - 01:25 AM.

[SRX660]

Welcome to Geeks to Go!, Fairywings2005.

I would hope you have all the data you wanted to save backed up on cd's or dvd's. Since it sounds like you want to swap the 80 gig drive in as the "C" drive i would make sure the drive is clean(no data). You also sound like you don't mind reinstalling all your software to the new "C" drive. You have not mentioned if you have the Microsoft cd for installing or a recovery CD. You may not be able to use a recovery cd to install on a different drive. You can reuse the 20 Gig drive as a slave to the 80 Gig drive by changing a jumper and moving the data cable connection to the middle connector. You do not need to wipe the 20 gig drive and can move data to the 80 giger later. Although the 20 gig will have a active partition as slave it still won't try booting up in the OS. If you have data on the 80 Giger, and if you have room on the 20 giger you can move data to the 20 and then after making the 20 giger the slave drive, move the data back to the 80 giger.

There are jumpers in the back of the drives where you can set the drives as Master, Slave, or Cable Select. On most new drives setting the jumper to CS(Cable Select) will let XP decide what the drives is. By putting the end of the data cable to the 80 gig drive it will be designated as the main "C" drive and any other drive that is hooked to the middle connector on the cable will be the slave drive. The drive letter can vary according to how the operating system was installed. If the slave drive is installed after installing the Operating system, it will usually be the "E" or later drive letter. If the slave drive is installed before the OS is installed it will be the "D" drive and any cdrom, or dvd drives will be the "E" or later drives.

I just tried an experment with Paragon Drive Copy 8.0 where i had 6.2 gigs on a 20 gig HD that i wanted to move to a larger drive. I used drive copy 8 to move the whole operating system to a 160 gig HD. In about 30 minutes i had Successfully moved the whole XP operating system with all the programs i had installed over to the 160 G drive. The first time i rebooted the computer after the transfer it booted into safe mode (which did surprise me) but i picked to boot into normal mode and it then booted into XP normally. All the programs work that i have tried so far and there seems to be no problems with the transfer to the new drive. At a price of $25 i do think this is a cheap method to move the operating system to a newer larger drive. It is just a thought as i know it can take days to get a new reinstall of windows like you want it.

I hope this is not too much information for you. It is not hard to do this kind of swap. You just need to know the procedure so everything comes out like you would like it.

Heres a Drive Copy link.

http://www.drive-copy.de/eng/eshop.htm

Any other questions you have please ask as the more knowledge you have the easier it will be. Perhaps this could evolve into a good tutorial on swaping to a larger HD.

SRX660

Edited by SRX660, 18 November 2006 - 01:25 AM.

[fairywings2005]

Thanks for the info, i have most of what i want to keep saved on disc, been having a few problems with my rom not picking up that there is a blank disc in there to copy the files too but that's another story, anyway, yes i have the original program disc and no i'm not really worried about having to reinstall everything, i have a lot of missing files and programs that just aren't dying when i delete them so i thought i needed to get rid of everything and start again but swap drives over while i'm at it, I'm still learning things as i go and all info is appreciated, i think i can follow what you said well enough to swap the drives over, and i'll have a look at the link you provided and see what i can get from there.

Thanks again

[fairywings2005]

Ok well i got a fresh install but the system refused to partition my 80gig hard drive, it kept making
me go back till i worked out it wasnt going to let me partition that drive no matter how much
space i allocated, so am still on the 20gig. It said that the drive wasn't compatable with windows?
Good news is everything runs faster now, does anyone know why setup would say it's not compatible

[fungit]

Hi,

Is your 80GB HDD SATA(thin cable going from motherboard to HDD) and your 20GB just plain ATA ( wide grey cable going from motherboard to HDD)?

If 80GB HDD is SATA and you want to install XP on it, you might have to install the RAID drivers again.

If it is because of the reason above you can't install XP on the drive, please post back and I'll take you step by step on how to install.

Hope this helps

[peterm]

I would keep the 20gig a the operating system drive. Then think about a partiton of the 80gig to A program Drive and a data drive. I would also maybe break the 20gig in 2 this way when you get a problem you know you can reformat that 20 gig only (or 10 if you break it) and your data will be safe.
Since windows (even vista) will sit on 10gis why risk all by making the 80gig your C drive.
Just my thoughts

[SRX660]

What make of drive is the 80 giger? Can you see the 80 G drive is disk management?

SRX660