Losing all my data! Upgrading to XP with additional hard drive...

[Nick]

Im getting very worried...

I am upgrading from Windows98 to WindowsXP. I also bought a new
Western Digital 100g harddrive.

So... I installed WindowsXP on my new hardrive and, when it finished,
plugged in my old 60g IBM deskstar hard drive. I am able to view both
partitions (F,G) of my old hardrive fine, but when I try to copy files
from the partition 'G' to my new hard drive, I get an error message
saying...

"Cannot copy 'file': The request could not be performed because of an
I/O device error."

I downloaded Data Lifeguard Tools from Western Digital, which is
supposed to copy the files from my old drive to my new one, but only
1/10 of the files are actually copying. The rest have file sizes of
0k. I aslo tried booting up my old drive and Windows98 said...

"Windows could not be initialized because not enough memory is
available"

IBM has not been able to give me any help whatsoever. I am getting
very worried because I have alot of info on there that I cannot live
without. Does anyone have a solution for how I can save the files from
my old hard drive?

-Nick

 

[Stoney]

I would make sure the IDE cable that came with the new hard drive is
used for the new hard drive on primary IDE jumped as master and I
would put the old hard drive is on the IDE cable it was on and put it
in IDE2 jumped as master, if it still doesn't copy, then I would try
to copy the data from G to F and then copy the data from the F
partition to the new drive.

Scan for virus' on the old drive, try running scandisk and defrag on
the old drive. I would also make sure the system isn't putting a
pagefile.sys on the old drive, if there is a pagefile.sys file on the
old drive then the data may get hung up in there and fail. make sure
the swap file (aka pagefile.sys) is only on the new 100GB drive.

to do this go to system properties/advanced/performance settings/
advanced / and in the virtual memory area click change /highlight the
C drive (100GB) and put 750 for initial and 750 for maximum and click
set. (you can research what you want to set it to later but for now
750 is fine) then click your other drives and click "no paging
file".

The reason I say to try this is because when you try to boot to the
win98 drive you get memory errors"

If this doesn't work, put paging files on the old partitions (maybe
they need one) and try again.
I think one of these proceedures will work. Let me know.