I have an old, slow 13.6 gig in my current rig, and am soon to acquire a new 40 gig drive soon. What I want to do is use the new one as the primary drive (c: at least) and the old drive as a backup, for things rarely used.
Basically, I want to do this:
Partition new drive up into say, 4 X 10 gigs (or whatever…)
Duplicate current c: drive entirely onto new drive’s 1st partition, including boot sector.
Make the 1st partition on the new drive c:, completely avoiding having to reinstall everything.
It may not be a good idea to duplicate your old frive exactly onto the new one, but it can be done.
One problem with Windows is that the registry gets cluttered with old stuff that now serves no purpose. That slows things down, and can even cause problems. If you don’t have problems, go ahead, but a clean installation would be better.
If you do want to copy the drive, Norton Ghost works well. It allows you to make an image of a drive for backup, and the older version I’ve used at work also copies directly. There are one or two similar programs I’ve seen ads for but don’t remember. You could keep a backup image on the old drive, or burn one onto several CDs.
depending on the hard drive, the manufacturor may supply a utility to do this for you. It will operate off a floppy and require that Windows not be running. For instance, Western Digital has had a utility to do this for years. Basically, you install the new drive as a slave, use the utility to make the copy, then swap the master/slave arrangement. Check the support section on the manu. website for the drive you plan to get - there may be a readme to explain how to do this with minimum pain.
And… unless you have a compelling reason to break the drive into 4 10GB chunks, I would look at 2 20GB chunks or maybe a 15 and 25GB chunk.
I’m assuming that the current drive is pretty full. It would be good if the partition that the old image is going into was a good bit bigger. Future software installs will still add files to the primary partition even if you tell them to install to one of the “empty” partitions.
I did pretty much the same thing you are talking about. I installed the new disk, then dragged important files over to the new disk. Not software apps, just files. I wanted to do clean installs on the apps I still used, but not everything.
Then I went back to the old drive wiped it clean and did a re-install of the OS. I was suprised at how much space I saved by removing all the clutter from the registry, and the thing ran much faster. Now I had the original drive clean and only the OS is on there. Then I reinstalled pertinant drivers and made sure all apps were installed on the newer, faster drive to optimize the whole thing. I was very happy with the cleanup and the increase in speed of bootup and apps.
If you have the time, I recommend this procedure. It took me about 6 hours (doing it for the first time). I did not partition the new drive though. What reason would there be to? Curious.
Depending on the OS, you may not have a choice. Last I checked FAT32 was limited to 32GB. Of course if you are using NT/2K/XP, you can format with NTFS & then use the full drive. I would second the suggestion not to partition unless there is a need.
Hmmm. I’m typing this from a Win98 box which boots from a 40GB FAT32 partition. And on the table behind me is one which boots from an 80GB FAT32 partition. From Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 154997:
“…the FAT32 file system supports hard disks up to 2 terabytes in size…”