TUTORIAL ON INSTALLING NEW HD USING OLD ONE AS SLAVE?

P

Peter

Anyone got advice or can point me to a good tutorial on installing a new
hard drive in my PC. I have XP Pro full retail and will buy Acronis True
Image if necessary.
The plan is to eventually use my new bigger HD as the master and keep the
old one as a slave.
Just not too sure of the various steps to take.
1 scenario - install new one first as the slave and use Acronis T.I. to
clone the system over. Then swap the drives (assuming I have to make the
new "system" active and fiddle in the BIOS.).
 
B

Bob I

Read at the instructions that come with the drive and use the
manufacturers drive copy utility to make the swap.
 
P

Peter

Thanks guys...I forgot that the drive comes with a CD and book etc... it
hasn't arrived yet.
 
K

Kerry Brown

Peter said:
Anyone got advice or can point me to a good tutorial on installing a
new hard drive in my PC. I have XP Pro full retail and will buy
Acronis True Image if necessary.
The plan is to eventually use my new bigger HD as the master and keep
the old one as a slave.
Just not too sure of the various steps to take.
1 scenario - install new one first as the slave and use Acronis T.I.
to clone the system over. Then swap the drives (assuming I have to
make the new "system" active and fiddle in the BIOS.).

Steps for using TI to install a new hard drive.

1) Install TI
2) Create TI recovery boot CD
3) Install new drive as master drive on the primary disk controller
4) Install old drive as slave to new drive or on another controller
5) Boot from TI recovery CD and clone old drive to new drive. If your old
drive has more than one partition make sure you set the sizes for the
partitions on the new drive appropriately.
6) When the clone is finished do not let the computer reboot. Shut off the
power
7) Temporarily remove old drive
8) Boot from new drive
9) Shut down computer and reconnect old drive which can now be formatted and
used as a secondary drive

There may be circumstances where you may use a slightly different procedure
but the above will cover most cases.
 
P

Peter

Interesting Kerry, thanks for that. I haven't got the new drive or TI yet
so want to get the "tips" first!
My current HD is 160gb with partitions as follows::
C: XP Pro SP2 System (85gb)
D: XP Pro SP2 dual boot for testing purposes (both full retail) (27gb)
E: Spare (38gb)
F: Backup (11gb)
Sizes give or take..all NTFS. Would I have to tell TI to partition exactly
as per those...leaving a lot over as my new drive will be 250gb.

Reason? Old drive occasionally reports bad sectors (despite chdsk /r) in
Event Viewer
 
K

Kerry Brown

During the cloning process with TI you can change the sizes of the
partitions on the new drive. It will suggest some values which will increase
each partition proportionately or you can specify a size for each partition.
If the current drive has bad sectors you may run into problems. It will
depend on where the bad sectors are located.
 
P

Peter

I used western digital's tool to repair the current drive and at present
it's showing no errors at all.
Does TI create the partitions as it goes along or will I have to format and
create them first?
 
K

Kerry Brown

Peter said:
I used western digital's tool to repair the current drive and at
present it's showing no errors at all.
Does TI create the partitions as it goes along or will I have to
format and create them first?

It will erase any partitions you create so let it do all the work.
 
P

Peter

Just realised that Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools will do all this
for me anyway.
 

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