I have a Dell Dimension 4100 that came with a 10Gig hard drive, designated as the “C” drive. I had a 40Gig hard drive, designated as the “D” drive added. I think the “C” drive might be getting a little bit flaky and would like to substitute the “D” drive for the “C.”
As usual, I don’t have the slightest idea how to go about it. So, can anyone point the way or refer me to a message board more suitable for this kind of question?
Well you’ll have to either backup the data on the D drive or be willing to erase it.
I’d pickup a program such as Norton Ghost which can either create an image of your C: (which you could burn onto DVD-R) or just copy to a new drive. Programs such as these usually require that the destination drive be formatted first.
This page explains how to copy information from C: to D: by just using the Ms-Dos Xcopy command. I haven’t tried it but it could be worth a try.
If you manage to get it working then you’ll have to make your ‘new’ C: the master drive by switching the jumpers physically on the drive though some new systems let the bios control this.
i am getting ready to do the same thing to a compaq presario. the existing hard drive is very flaky. it works ok as long as i am not very demanding of it, but freezes up under load (scans ect.) seeing what was ahead, i bought a maxtor one touch II external hard drive (rated as the best buy inpc world magazine
i have created a back up copy of my entire hard drive on this device. according to maxtor’s instructions, i should be able to install the new hard drive, install the operating system and select a restore point on the maxtor drive to bring my computer back to its present configuration
we’ll see if it works. this may be the last post from this computer…
I’m not sure you can setup Windows on your current D drive without deleting it as part of the install process. I’m not sure about that though.
A couple of unknowns that impact your best course:
a) Do you have any programs installed on D:, or if it is all data?
b) Is it within your budget to buy a new C: drive and continue to use D: as the secondary data drive? Or do you prefer to throw away C: and begin using D: as your only drive?
c) Do you have a file server (ftp or windows or other) or backup device at your disposal? This could be key because you may need a place to store stuff temporarily, specifically, you may want to backup you D: drive, install windows on it, and restore your current D: data back on to it.
Depending on the best course taken based on your answers to the above, I’ll tell you in advance that you may want to check out g4u (ghost for unix) and/or SystemRescueCd ( http://www.sysresccd.org/ ). These are opensource versions of Ghost. They’re both on linux, but they’ll backup any sort of partition, including FAT and NTFS. SystemRescueCd also has a partition resizer, which may be key if transfer your C drive to a new D one. Surprisingly, Ghost is a much weaker product than these.
The xcopy command does not correctly retain the short filenames that Windows uses for 8.3 filename references (e.g. PROGRA~1 for “Program Files”). This is not an issue if you are copying data and you only ever access the data using the long filename.
This becomes a real problem if you are trying to copy a system disk with installed programs and the like since MS uses short filenames on command lines in various sneaky places of the OS (e.g. the registry).
BTW, using xcopy is not a good idea. There’s still the registry to contend with, plus setting up boot sectors, plus permissions, plus things I’ve forgotten. Don’t go that way.