Adding New HD - Quick Q's

[Bodyag]

I finally bought myself another HD tonight, as the 80gig one I have not is not nearly enough. I was just wondering if I should transfer Windows over to my newer, faster, and much bigger hard drive, or leave it isolated on my old one? My new hard drive is definately superior, as it has 16mb cache as opposed to 8mb, is 250gb vs. 80gb, and will be on SATA connection rather than IDE. If I were to transfer Windows over to my new one, will I be forced to delete everything I have on my old HD, or can is there an easy way to do it? Thanks for any and all help.

[SensoVision]

Hi Bodyag!

I finally bought myself another HD tonight, as the 80gig one I have not is not nearly enough

congratulations with new drive!
Personally if I would use Windows OS and found myself in similar to your situation,  I wouldn't take step of installing it on bigger and faster drive simply because it SATA and w2k and XP from what I remember could only be installed if you ship a driver on a floppy disk (isn't it stupid when most new PCs not have them by default and many people use USB drives?) and I don't even have floppy drive anymore), but if your motherboard could emulate SATA as IDE than it shouldn't be a case. Also if you have floppy drive and drivers from motherboard it shouldn't cause a problem.

If I were to transfer Windows over to my new one, will I be forced to delete everything I have on my old HD, or can is there an easy way to do it? Thanks for any and all help.

The easiest and most reliable way is to make fresh install and setup software you need from scratch, such operation is good for Windows from time to time and it make OS to run faster even if you didn't upgrade equipment
Regarding other ways there are programs which let you create images from partitions, so in theory you may create image of partition and transfer it to new drive, but you must make sure that drive naming wouldn't be changed and I'm not 100% sure that everything would work as never did such operation. (Not sure if it's worth to invest in such program if you need it only ones and I'm not sure if free ones exist for Windows).

hope this info helps a bit.

[donecweb]

First are you sure your XP CD recognizes your 250GB HD? I tried and even with the upgrades XP would not see the drive as 250GB but as 137GB even though the bios did see it as 250GB. If your XP CD recognises your HD as 250GB and you want to use Windows, then I would go with making the new drive as the master, (Do not connect the old drive until you have the new Windows XP system installed) the old drive as the slave and completely reinstall Windows on the new drive as a clean install. Of course this means you must reinstall all your software. However at this point there is not a reliable method of transferring systems between hard drives that works well. Also starting from scratch gives the advantage of having the content arranged well on your hard drive without any fragmentation or contaminated cache etc. Then copy all your My Documents files etc over to your new drive and erase the old drive using it as storage as even if you are able to dual boot both Windows XP HDs the system will not be reliable as many problems have been associated with such a setup as they both want the first portion of the master drive for themselves.

I know you didn't ask but I would recommend switching to SimplyMepis 6.0 Linux (SML) and installing it onto your new drive using 1GB for a swap file and a large portion of the drive as a fat 32 logical drive that can be used as data drive that is accessable from both Windows and SimplyMepis 6.0 Linux (SML). Doing this I would keep the small drive as the master drive and add the new drive as the slave. Since SimplyMepis 6.0 Linux (SML) can run form any partition. Then you can use Grub that comes with SimplyMepis 6.0 Linux (SML) to dual boot giving you the option of running Windows and SimplyMepis 6.0 Linux (SML). This also gives you the security that Vista is trying to achieve and yet you can use both types of software.

By the way welcome to Webmaster Key forum Bodyag.

[SensoVision]

Since Don start talking about Linux, I'll add few words from myself as well
PS having Linux is actually could be useful even for Windows users these days, actually just yesterday XP died after driver installation on her notebook, even safe mode didn't worked so the only way to access files quickly was Debian which was installed purposely for learning there along with Windows. We need those files today urgently so don't know what we do without Linux

I know you didn't ask but I would recommend switching to SimplyMepis 6.0 Linux (SML) and installing it onto your new drive using 1GB for a swap file and a large portion of the drive as a fat 32 logical drive that can be used as data drive that is accessable from both Windows and SimplyMepis 6.0 Linux (SML).

Should mention that it's recommended to have swap 2 times more than size of RAM you have installed on system, although 1 Gb should work for most systems(actually I have swap which is 1 gb and I have 1 gb of RAM, swap is rarely used only if I have really many tasks running simultaneously).

If you're interested in learning and using Linux not necessarily those mentioned by me or Don feel free to post your questions in our Linux dedicated board.