Replacing HDD drives

G

Guest

Hello. I'll first highlight the situation. I had a system with 2 drives, IBM
and Maxtor. I have decided to replace the first one (ide primary master) with
a serial ata one. I have installed the disk, managed to config Linux to boot
off it and now I came to the hardest part,
My PC was booting off the disk (actually, off its primary partiton, drive C)
I am going to replace. Ithe windows itself is stored on the other drive, IBM
disk contained just the ntldr, boot.ini and friends. My question is, will it
be possible to recreate these files on the new disk without a clean install?
With the help of fixboot and fixmbr?
ANd the second thing. As Maxtor disk can no longer be a slave, how will that
impact the existing windows install? shall I expect drive letters mess?
Thank you for the response in advance.
 
G

Guest

I will try to make it easier to comprehend.
1. The disk going away contains the primary active partition (C:) with
ntldr, boot.ini and friends
2. The new disk has nothing to do with OS whatsoever
3. The disk that is staying contains two installed copies od Windows on two
primary partitions and some irrelevant logical partitions.
4. I would like to make the first partition on the Maxtor disk (currently
L:) the active one, install necessary files there and make the PC boot off
this disk. I'm planning to accomplish the task with fixmbr, fixboot and
bootcfg commands.
5. The question is how the above change would affect the drive letters (L
will probably change to C) and how will that affect the existing windows
installs.
 
G

Gene K

Most major drive manufacturers, Maxtor included, provide software plus
fairly detailed instructions on how to image an old drive to a new one and
then turn the new drive into the Master (bootable OS drive) or prime drive.
The Maxtor software is called MaxBlast. You may not need that; however, view
the instructions.
Gene K
 

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