Advice request on a 2nd hd

[Rose]

I have accumulated some 'barter points' with my computer tech/repair person
and a second hard drive came up as a possibility. I wondered if there were
any suggestions for the set up.
If the new hard drive is more efficient than the current one would it be
possible to transfer the contents of existing drive to new drive and new
drive becomes boot drive?
Paint Shop Pro photographic image edits is the biggest file situation and I
have been burning to CD collections of images. Because the 'old days' are in
my background I habitually keep the hard drive with minimal to no 'excess'
stuff so I'm having a little difficulty getting my head around yet a second
huge storage area <wry grin>
Perhaps I don't need it at all and upgrading the video would be just as
well?
Of course, he offered a most recent machine at his cost which means fine
tuning XP all over again. I interpret a new issue of Xp would be required.
It seems to me I just got this set up to be exactly how I want it <LOL> so I
suggested the hard drive addition and now I need input.
I have a lawn service so now he sees his lawn as the 'best on the street' so
I DO have brownie points accumulated <HA!>
Rose
I have WinXp sp1 (and up todate patches) the machine was put together a year
ago (sp1 NOT saved to Cd in the download, drat!)
1200 megahertz AMD Duron
128 kilobyte primary memory cache
64 kilobyte secondary memory cache
Board: ECS K7S5A 1.0
Bus Clock: 66 megahertz
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. 07.00T 04/02/01
512 Megabytes Installed Memory
LITEON DVD-ROM LTD163D [CD-ROM drive]
MSI CD-RW MS-8340 [CD-ROM drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]

Maxtor 2F030J0 (30.75 GB) [Hard drive] -- drive 0 ( 22.47 GB free)

NVIDIA RIVA TNT [Display adapter] 16
Dell D1028L [Monitor]

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Rose.

From your description of your computer and your use of it, your best bet
might be to simply keep your present setup and add the second drive to it.
Just physically make sure the jumpers and cables are correct and plug in the
new drive as primary master. Then boot into WinXP and use Disk Management
to partition and format the new drive. No need to reinstall anything; at
least, not now.

With the excellent Disk Management tool, it might be a good idea to
partition only half(?) of the new drive at first. You can expand into the
rest later, if you need it. Meanwhile, you can have this big "scratch pad"
area to create new volumes to try out new things. And you only have to
defrag half as much disk space each week.

When I added my third HD, a Maxtor 120 GB drive, last year, I created a
minimal (8 MB) primary partition at the front of the drive and formatted it
FAT(16) for maximum compatibility. Like you, I well remember the "old days"
and I like the idea that, if my main SCSI drive ever dies, I can boot into
the MS-DOS that I've installed on this new drive. In fact, I've also
created WinXP boot files there, too, so I can boot into WinXP from that
drive, if necessary. Most of that drive, though, is an extended partition.
I've created a 60 GB logical drive on the first half, which I use for
photos, music and other graphic files, plus backups of my smaller HDs. And
I still have a lot of space left in that 60 GB. Meantime, the last 60 GB is
unformatted.

That is, it WAS unformatted, until last May, when my main data volume (25
GB) on my 2nd HD (30 GB) developed problems so severe that ChkDsk couldn't
even run on it. So I created a new 25 GB volume in that unformatted space
on the 3rd HD and used it temporarily as my data volume while searching for
a solution. (I did have backups for my most important data.) Last month,
finally, I got R-Studio to recover my lost files. I created ANOTHER 25 GB
volume on that 3rd HD and used it as a place to restore the files from my
bad volume. Now, at last, I can reformat my original volume on the second
HD and move the restored files, plus the new data files I've created in the
interim, back onto that volume. Then I can delete my two temporary volumes
on the 3rd HD and have that 50 GB of unformatted space available for future
use. All of this might have been possible if I had formatted the entire new
HD in the beginning, but it's much easier to deal with whole recovery
volumes (represented by just a drive letter), rather than with recovery
folders within a larger working volume (represented by a long pathname).

That's more than you asked, but I thought you might find it
thought-provoking.

Enjoy that big new drive!

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP

I have accumulated some 'barter points' with my computer tech/repair person
and a second hard drive came up as a possibility. I wondered if there were
any suggestions for the set up.
If the new hard drive is more efficient than the current one would it be
possible to transfer the contents of existing drive to new drive and new
drive becomes boot drive?
Paint Shop Pro photographic image edits is the biggest file situation and I
have been burning to CD collections of images. Because the 'old days' are in
my background I habitually keep the hard drive with minimal to no 'excess'
stuff so I'm having a little difficulty getting my head around yet a second
huge storage area <wry grin>
Perhaps I don't need it at all and upgrading the video would be just as
well?
Of course, he offered a most recent machine at his cost which means fine
tuning XP all over again. I interpret a new issue of Xp would be required.
It seems to me I just got this set up to be exactly how I want it <LOL> so I
suggested the hard drive addition and now I need input.
I have a lawn service so now he sees his lawn as the 'best on the street' so
I DO have brownie points accumulated <HA!>
Rose
I have WinXp sp1 (and up todate patches) the machine was put together a year
ago (sp1 NOT saved to Cd in the download, drat!)
1200 megahertz AMD Duron
128 kilobyte primary memory cache
64 kilobyte secondary memory cache
Board: ECS K7S5A 1.0
Bus Clock: 66 megahertz
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. 07.00T 04/02/01
512 Megabytes Installed Memory
LITEON DVD-ROM LTD163D [CD-ROM drive]
MSI CD-RW MS-8340 [CD-ROM drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]

Maxtor 2F030J0 (30.75 GB) [Hard drive] -- drive 0 ( 22.47 GB free)

NVIDIA RIVA TNT [Display adapter] 16
Dell D1028L [Monitor]