Help me out with this XP hard drive install question

geepondy

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Ok, here's what I want to do. I currently have a drive partitioned as C and D with XP installed on the C drive. I also have another hard drive which is E. I am going to buy and install a much bigger drive, partition that into two drives and copy the XP OS into one of the partitions and then disconnect my second E drive and replace it with my original C/D drive of which at some point I'll probably partition back into one drive. Sound confusing?

Here's is the plan and what I foresee as a possibly problem. I have an external drive. I will back the current C, OS drive into that. I will then install the new hard drive, partition that into two drives. When I do that, of course windows will name it two different drive letters, as F is the CD drive, I'm guess G and H. I will then copy the backed up OS from the external drive into one of the two new drive letters. As mentioned, I then want to disconnect the original drive and have this new drive become the C and D drives but the problem I see is will Windows let me do that or will it force the new drive to remain at the drive letters it originally assigned it? As all my desktop and program shortcuts point to the C drive, I think this will be a problem if it doesn't plus of course I want the computer to boot off the new drive with copied OS.

Or if anybody has suggestions on the best way to accomplish my original plan, please share.
 

mechBgon

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That's not going to work quite so easily.

If you have WinXP Professional or Media Center Edition, and have a floppy drive in the system, then you could make an Automated System Recovery backup, save it to the external drive, install your new large drive, begin Windows Setup from CD-ROM, and perform an Automated System Recovery by pressing the F2 key when prompted, right at the beginning of Windows Setup. When you do this, make sure your new drive is the only internal drive that's hooked up, so it can have drive letter C:. If you run ASR and see that the external drive has grabbed drive letter C:, then disconnect it and start over with the ASR process, plugging in the external drive when the time comes to supply the ASR Backup file.

ASR is pretty powerful. I've resurrected an entire Domain on entirely different server hardware with Windows Server 2003's ASR. To use ASR, go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools and fire up Backup.

Some HDD makers also have a migration utility for this sort of thing. What brand of HDD are you buying?


Oh, and the drive letter assignments made by the previous installation of Windows wouldn't "stick," so E: and F: can indeed become C: and D:. However, if another hard drive has drive letter C: during Windows Setup, then your boot drive cannot get C:, and it's not simple to change the drive letter of your boot drive either.
 
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Egsise

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If you are not familiar with this type of thing, leave it to professionals, this type of work costs only about 100-150€ if professional does it for you.

Download http://www.ubcd4win.com/index.htm

Burn that UBCD.iso to a cd
Boot from it
Run DriveimageXML
Backup your C and D partitions to usb HD(split and compress)
Remove old C and D drive
Install new HD
Boot with UBCD
Make partitions(same size or bigger than the old, C should be only 40-100GB or it affects system speed)
Set C: as active(right click my computer, manage, disk management)
Boot with UBCD
Restore C and D with driveimageXML
Boot from C
Make sure EVERYTHING is as it should be
Remove new HD
Install old HD
Boot from UBCD
Format old C and D or remove partitions and make new ones
Install new HD
Boot from it

Easy :)
 

geepondy

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The drive I plan on getting will be a WD 1 gig black, forget the model. I have Acronis True Image which is what I use to back up the C drive to my external drive. It comes with a boot utility so I was hoping that I could install and partition the new drive, then remove all drives except new drive, boot with Acronis and then transfer the saved former C drive info back to the first partition of the new drive.
 

mechBgon

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Yet another option is to use the Files And Settings Transfer Wizard to back up your user-related files and settings onto your external drive. Then disconnect the old drives, connect the new drive, and run Windows Setup. Once you're done installing and updating Windows, install your software programs, then use the FAST wizard to restore your user-specific files and settings.

If something doesn't go quite right, or it turns out you forgot some files that weren't located in your user profile, then you can simply shut down, disconnect the new drive, reconnect the old drive, and you're back on your feet. The main drawback is that you have to rummage for your software discs and reinstall the software. If you have 20 games, an office suite, etc, that begins to make an image-based backup attractive.
 

mechBgon

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The drive I plan on getting will be a WD 1 gig black, forget the model. I have Acronis True Image which is what I use to back up the C drive to my external drive. It comes with a boot utility so I was hoping that I could install and partition the new drive, then remove all drives except new drive, boot with Acronis and then transfer the saved former C drive info back to the first partition of the new drive.

TrueImage has a "transplant my OS to a new drive" feature, that's a great option! :thumbsup:
 

at4rxj

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I would also recommend doing a clean install on the new drive. If you can't, you can go into the admin control panel under disk management and change your drive letters.
 

Dave.

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If you have Acronis True Image you have everything you need already, and luckily for you in the best possible way as True Image is the best way to go about cloning a primary partition.

All you have to do is install your new drive and format/partition it the way you want, either internally or in an external caddy, then boot up True Image and clone your OS drive onto the new one. Job done. After that swap the new drive for the old one (dont worry about drive letters or anything) and boot from your new drive then copy all the date from the non-boot partition on your old drive. At this point you will have an exact replica of your original primary drive, only on a new drive.

I did the same thing myself not so long ago and the only thing I did different was to use an external drive caddy to make my life easier. My only warning would be to make sure you are very certain you identify the right drive and partition to clone your original partition to, it shouldn't be too hard seeing as the partition size will be so much larger on the new drive but it's a good idea to disconnect any drive not involved in the procedure just to be safe before you start.
 

matrixshaman

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Was that a 1 gigabyte drive or 1 terabyte? A 1 gig drive is small by todays standards so I thought I'd ask as you may have some other problems if you are installing a 1 terabyte drive. The only problem is typically that the BIOS doesn't recognize that large of a drive if your computer is a bit older. One other little tip - once you've copied everything to the new drive if it won't boot check to make sure the boot partition is listed as 'Active' otherwise if it's not it won't boot.
 

geepondy

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Yes, you're right, One Terabyte. The computer is not state of the art but fairly new, an Athlon 6000+ X2 system.
 

Egsise

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.....make sure you are very certain you identify the right drive and partition to clone your original partition to, it shouldn't be too hard seeing as the partition size will be so much larger on the new drive but it's a good idea to disconnect any drive not involved in the procedure just to be safe before you start.

As i said before, keep that new C partition under 100GB if possible, otherwise it will slow your computer.
 

mechBgon

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I'm not sure what the advantage would be to a small C: partition, unless it's working on the "short-stroking" principle. In this day of NCQ-enabled drives and controllers, and the next stage being solid-state drives, short-stroking may not help much... as I recall, studies found it didn't help much in servers as a way of getting 15000rpm performance levels from 10000rpm drives. In practical terms, if you're planning to put a decent-sized music library in your user's Music folder (for example), you could run yourself right out of space in C: if you only have 40-100GB available.

On the bright side, Vista can extend your C: partition using unused space from the other partition if necessary (this is done in Disk Management, which you can reach by right-clicking Computer on the Start menu and choosing Manage). So there's a way out if you need it.
 

Egsise

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Just try simple HD speed test, best performance is in the first 10-30% of the HD.
Not much, only about 20% difference on overall speed.

If you get 20% more lumens from your AA-flashlight just by using 14500 Li-Ion, do you still use NiMH? :sssh:
 

mechBgon

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Just try simple HD speed test, best performance is in the first 10-30% of the HD.
Not much, only about 20% difference on overall speed.

If you get 20% more lumens from your AA-flashlight just by using 14500 Li-Ion, do you still use NiMH? :sssh:

Sequential transfer rate (STR) is definitely higher on the outer tracks, but it doesn't translate directly into higher application performance. Cacheing strategies and smart seeking using TCQ/NCQ will make or break the actual drive performance.

You can see that reflected in a lot of StorageReview's benchmarks... for example, the Seagate Cheetah 15k.6 has a peak STR of over 170MB/second. No desktop hard drive can touch that (other than certain solid-state drives [SSDs]). Its track-to-track and average seek times are also lightning-fast. For database work, this is greased lightning, perfect for dealing with a stack of 100+ data I/O requests at once. But for desktop use, something like a Western Digital VelociRaptor, despite its much lower STR, will probably perform better at loading your games and so forth. STR is simply not that important.

StorageReview performance database for those interested in looking at their results. SCSI drives dominate server/database work, with their TCQ capabilities and low seek times, but they don't dominate the desktop-type workloads, despite HUGE advantages in raw STR.

In the bigger picture, SSDs are maturing very fast, so this will all be academic before long :)
 
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Egsise

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Sequential transfer rate (STR) is definitely higher on the outer tracks, but it doesn't translate directly into higher application performance. Cacheing strategies and smart seeking using TCQ/NCQ will make or break the actual drive performance.

You can see that reflected in a lot of StorageReview's benchmarks... for example, the Seagate Cheetah 15k.6 has a peak STR of over 170MB/second. No desktop hard drive can touch that (other than certain solid-state drives [SSDs]). Its track-to-track and average seek times are also lightning-fast. For database work, this is greased lightning, perfect for dealing with a stack of 100+ data I/O requests at once. But for desktop use, something like a Western Digital VelociRaptor, despite its much lower STR, will probably perform better at loading your games and so forth. STR is simply not that important.

StorageReview performance database for those interested in looking at their results. SCSI drives dominate server/database work, with their TCQ capabilities and low seek times, but they don't dominate the desktop-type workloads, despite HUGE advantages in raw STR.

In the bigger picture, SSDs are maturing very fast, so this will all be academic before long :)

So you are saying that there is no impact on performance no matter how you make partitions?
And that is with normal WD HD, not SCSI, not SSD, not velociraptor.
 

mechBgon

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So you are saying that there is no impact on performance no matter how you make partitions?
And that is with normal WD HD, not SCSI, not SSD, not velociraptor.

Mechanical HDD performance is a complex topic, so I don't want to oversimplify, but the benchmarking at SR seems to support this: the drive's data-cacheing strategies easily trump sustained transfer rates as the determining factor in real-world performance. Increasing STR by 20% or even 50% is still just a small part of the drive-performance scenario.

Their take, posted on every review right below the STR graphs:

Many additional factors combine to yield aggregate high-level hard disk performance above and beyond these two easily measured yet largely irrelevant metrics [STR and average seek time]. In the end, drives, like all other PC components, should be evaluated via application-level performance.

In automotive terms, think about race cars. The performance of the car isn't just measured by sticking the engine on a dyno, or we wouldn't need race tracks, would we :thumbsup:

My viewpoint is that the practical impact of having a small C: partition is that you can run yourself out of space. My C: partition is 82.5GB at the moment, and I haven't even reinstalled my Steam games. Modern games can take 5GB at a shot, music and movies steadily nibble away at it... so I don't want to paint myself into a corner :ohgeez:
 
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geepondy

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Ok, I got it to work reasonably easy. I use WD Lifeguard tools to partition, format and copy the OS drive but it still booted off the old drive until I swapped SATA cables. Does the BIOS boot off of SATA order (0,1,2,3)?

I made the boot drive 200G. Even if it impacts performance, Egsise is right, you can fill up the drive pretty quickly. I only made the last one 60G and that was a mistake.

By the way good deal on the drive this week at Best Buy. It's the ITB WD "Black" edition retail kit with SATA cable and cd utilities for $119.99. The drive is solid as a brick and the WD black drives rate well in reviews.
 
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