New hard drive installation easy question

[osprey4]

I just received a new WD 80-gig drive. I want to make this my primary master and use my current 20-gig drive as the primary slave. I want to retain the data on this drive.

Since my 20-gig drive is currently the primary DOS partition, is there any problem with just connecting the new drive as master and partitioning it as another primary DOS partition? Can I do this and retain the data on the old drive?

John

[chefde]

Yes you can, are you going to have the 20 gig on it's own IDE channel on the mother board?

[osprey4]

I have my CD-RW (secondary master) and DVD-ROM (secondary slave) on my second IDE controller. I was planning to put both HDs on the primary IDE controller. Both are ATA-100 (as is the controller).

John

[chefde]

Sounds like you know about all the jumper settings.

The data will remain intact but I don't think programs will run off the 20 gig. Make sure you backup all your address books and export them into the fresh install of what ever e-mail soft ware you are using.

I've done it a few times and all the data (word/excel documents etc.) work fine.

If you have a problem you can even change the jumpers & cables and make the 20 gig the master again if you missed something.


Chef

[osprey4]

Yes, it's a foregone conclusion that I'll have to reinstall all my apps. And I do have backups of all my critical information. As far as jumpers, my Dell is set up to use cable select, so there's no problem with that.

Thanks for the input. Hope to do this tomorrow,

John

[MaxVal]

If you are using FDISK to partition the new drive, you will need to remove the old drive in order to make the new drive bootable.
Have you thought of picking up a copy of Norton SystemWorks Pro or Drive copy to copy the old disk to the new?
It's even possible that there is a copy utility to do this that is included on the Data Lifeguard Tools floppy that comes with a retail disk.
I myself use a Norton Ghost floppy that is created from the ghost component of Norton SystemWorks Pro. It's easy and it works!
MAX

[osprey4]

Quote:

Originally posted by MaxVal
Have you thought of picking up a copy of Norton SystemWorks Pro or Drive copy to copy the old disk to the new?

What I want to do is kill two birds with one stone. Install the new drive and do a fresh install of the OS. So you're saying what I should do is (1)install the new drive by itself, (2)FDISK, (3)format with the /s key, (4)install the OS, then (5)put the old drive back in as slave.

Do I have it right?

John

[Kuasimodem]

That sounds about right to me, then you can import your favorites, address book and email folders from the old drive to the fresh install.

I just did the same thing with a friend's system when he put a new hard drive in it.

Might I recommend using the floppy that came with your hard drive to partition and format your new drive? It will be a lot faster than using fdisk and format. Also, I recommend that you break that 80Gb drive up a little bit for eficiency and safety. Put your OS and apps on a 20Gb primary partition, then have a couple other partitions for games and storage. By storing data on a seperate partition, it will protect the data if/when you have an OS crash and have to reload. I learned this the hard way.

[DLR37919]

Just format partion then put one drive on each cable and use ghost to transfer data to othe drive see if you can find norton ghost the older one is better.But if it were me i'd just put the 80 gig as slave for data storage and only have operating programs on 20 gig primary.

[MaxVal]

Sorry for the delay Jim, busy weekend!
Kuasimodem picked up the slack though.
If the exercise is not yet done, I would suggest that you consider a smaller primary partition. I use 8GB as my choice due to the fact that this size results in a 4Kb cluster size. Anything much larger will result in at least 8Kb, and at 20GB it will be 16Kb. Not that this is a real "problem", but the primary partition holds the O.S. and the many small files that it contains. Employing a smaller cluster size allows better utilization of the disk space.
The extended partition can use a larger cluster size with little wasted space because the file sizes that are normally placed there are larger.
An additional benefit of partitioning is the ability to use the second partition to store a compressed copy of a working O.S. for those times when things really get screwed up! Having a second hard drive is even better insurance of not losing much when a drive departs.
Keep in mind that regularly updating the images will ensure a more current O.S. if restored from an image.
I also keep two images, deleting the oldest after a new copy.
MAX