AntiMnemonic said:
I have an 80 GB ide drive and an 80 GB SATA drive. Windows XP Pro is
installed on the ide drive. The SATA drive is divided into 2 partitions,
1
for games and 1 for my personal files. My motherboard only has one ide
connector so with the ide drive connected I can only use one of my two
DVD-ROM drives. I have recently purchased a 320 GB SATA drive and
transferred everything from the 80 GB SATA drive onto the new drive. I
want
to tranfer everything (including the operating system) from the 80GB ide
drive to the 80GB SATA drive, and then give the empty ide drive to my
niece,
and finally be able to use both DVD-ROM drives again. All three hard
drives
are currently connected to this computer.
How do I do this? I can't imagine I'm the only person on earth to ever
want
to replace a hard drive, but I've been going around and around in "Help"
and
on the forums and can't seem to find what I need.
Any help would be appreciated. Sorry if I went into too much detail...
:>
Thank you! Casper 4.0 worked wonderfully and I am now operating from the
SATA drive. Windows started perfectly first time - in fact it started a
little faster than from the old drive.
In reply to your question as to what I use the larger drive for, I may
have
mistated what is on there. Half is for games (I already have two on there
that are bigger than 5 GB!) and the other half is "working space" - it's
where I install all programs that are non-gaming related, and where I have
all my photographs and scans. Most days I add about 100 MB of photos and
I
haven't even started saving them in RAW format yet, so I think I'm really
going to appreciate the extra space!
All that should really be on the C: is the operating system itself, and
some
of what I call "utility programs". Oh, and everything that won't let me
choose where to install it. Keeping the amount of data on this drive
makes
it easier and faster to defrag, which encourages me to do it more
regularly.
I plan to keep the old hard drive as a backup for the next two weeks. If
all goes well, it will get a complete wipe and then donated to my neice.
She
currently has about 3% of free space on her 40GB drive, so I'm sure she'll
appreciate it!
Again, thank you very much Anna for your help. It was an incredibly
painless operation.
AntiMnemonic:
Glad it all worked out. We've been mighty impressed with the Casper 4.0 disk
cloning program and we've been using it nearly exclusively for our disk
cloning operations as well as recommending that program to others.
As to your objective in keeping your boot drive "lean & mean" as it were, so
that it contains only the OS and some utility programs...if you're
comfortable with that arrangement and find that it meets your particular
needs...so be it. It's not the way we generally organize our PC systems but
whatever works for *you* - and not anyone else - must, of course, be your
guiding principle in organizing your system.
But now that you're working with the Casper 4.0 program which carries out
its disk-cloning operations effectively and with reasonably fast speed due
to its "SmartClone" technology so that you have a real incentive to back up
your system on a much more frequent basis than heretofore, might you give
consideration to incorporating *all* the data that's now contained on both
HDDs, i.e., the OS, your utility programs, your games, photos, etc. - in
short, *everything*, on a single large-capacity HDD such as your 320 GB HDD,
or perhaps even a larger one (see below)? And then, on a routine &
systematic basis, use your Casper 4.0 program to clone the contents of that
HDD to another large-capacity HDD (see below) and thus establish a
near-failsafe backup program?
Given today's modern HDDs & PC systems, I really don't see any intrinsic
value in this division of OS, programs, and user-created data either from a
performance or safety point of view - *provided* that one routinely employs
a comprehensive backup program such as provided by a disk cloning (or disk
imaging) one like the Casper 4.0 program that we've been discussing.
I might add that we are not "defragmenters", nor are we "partitioneers".
Based on our own experience and the various tests we have come across to
determine the effectiveness of defragmenting one's HDD, except for some very
unusual circumstances which seem to apply to only a tiny number of cases in
our experience, we are not convinced that routine disk defragmenting in an
XP environment is of any significant value. When users ask us about how
often they should defragment their disks we usually provide the previous
comment, but if they feel more comfortable in doing so - at least doing so
from time-to-time - we recommend carrying out those operations on New Years
Day and Independence Day. More than sufficient in our view. But once
again...if *you* believe routine defragmenting improves the operation of
your system - by all means pursue that course. At least except for a rare
occurrence we haven't found any issues of the defragmentation process going
awry and causing significant problems in an XP OS environment as we did
all-too-frequently encounter with previous operating systems.
I just thought I would add the above for your consideration and perhaps
others who might be interested.
It certainly sounds like you could use another large-capacity HDD. Are you
convenient to a Staples store? I notice Staples has on sale the WD 500 GB
SATA HDD this week - $119.99 (and no mail-in rebates!!). We've previously
worked with that disk and it's a nice one so if your present finances allow
you to swing for another large-capacity HDD, consider this one.
Anna
