NEW HARD DRIVE CONFUSION! HELP !!!!

[Wisegi]

HI All...

I want to thank you all for the help you have been providing and I'm hoping you can shine some light on a dark situation.

Let me start off with the scenerio...I recently purchased a maxtor 120 GB hd to replace the 40GB hd on my p4 pc. I installed the new hd as a slave then used the Maxblast 3 from maxtor to copy the old hd onto the new one creating 2 different partitions on the new drive at the same time. After that was completed which took numerous hrs, I changed the jumper settings and tried booting up the system with just the new drive installed but it would freeze up somwhere after the XP screen would come up. I couldn't even choose a USER. When I examine the drive it looks like everything copied.... after numerous attempts to boot into it I then unhooked the new drive and put the old drive back in and then it would get me to the user screens then it would lock up again not allowing me to login. Only after I connect both drives will it allow me to login and use the cpu.

Eventrully I want to just have the 120 GB hd in my system and completely remove the 40gb ( to use in my xbox) but before that happens I want to maintain all the documents/files on the original drive. I have come to the conclusion that I should just reformat the new drive and do a clean install of XP then transfer the the files from the old to the new - slave to master. What do you reccommend to reformat the new drive? should I create multiple partitions or should I leave it as a single partition.. I tried using the maxblast software to reformat but it didn't work...

I'm lost ... pls help me find my way out...

Thx

Rey

 

[edfair]

Maxblast was installed on your old drive to allow access to the new drive. New drive doesn't have maxblast to handle the filesystem. Then it locks when single drive since it doesn't have the other drive.
Don't know the ramifications of installing the OS on the big drive then adding the little drive as slave after it has had maxblast installed. Probably would look into undoing the max stuff totally first, then swap the drives out, install the OS on the big drive, then add the little to the system.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[Wisegi]

Hmmmm Does my 120 GB hard drive have to be using NTFS Rather then Fat32?

 

[slider23]

You don't need to use NTFS. FAT32 will work just fine. However, you should probably split up the drive into at least 2 partitions. It's a matter of opinion, but I like to separate the system partition that contains the OS, from apps/games/etc. It helps to minimize fragmentation, and when you do have to defragment, you don't have to do all 120GB at once.

slider

 

[Wisegi]

Hmmm ok what do you think NTFS or Fat32 which is better? Also what program do you suggest to reformat my drive?

 

[slider23]

New hard drives should come with a bootable floppy and CD-ROM that you can use to setup the hard drive. If you don't have it, you can download it from their website for free.

Another option is to use FDISK to create a partition, after booting from a Win98/ME floppy. After creating the partition, you can then either format it in FAT32 or NTFS. NTFS is said to be more efficient on larger partitions (>60GB), but you won't notice much difference between the two types except for security. Use NTFS if you care about password protection. Just be aware that NTFS can't be read by Win95/98/ME without a special utility, and you wil obviously need to boot to the NT CD in order to format it.

 

[Wisegi]

Hmmm Ok...

I have removed the original hd, and booted with a floppy and used fdisk to remove all the partitions...

Once removed I booted using an xp disk to bring me right into the installation ( couldn't complete it cause I couldn't find my activation code) but when I was going through it and it gave me the options for the different file system it only allowed me to choose NTFS or NTFS Quick....... I still want to be able to slave my old drive so I can transfer all the old files... if I do ntfs will I be able to do that..? If not ... how can I get Fat32 as an option?

Thx again

 

[paparazi]

Install new drive, on it's own as master on the primary IDE channel.
No need to mess around with old boot floppies, just set first boot device in the bios to CDrom, insert XP into the drive and reboot, XP will install tools (ignore repair option, go for new installation) first create a partition and then to format, choose quick format NTFS which will take about 20 seconds, once formatted XP will automatically go into setup proceedure, just follow it all the way to a Windows screen (about 40minutes)
When in Windows install motherboard drivers, add old drive, use Windows Explorer to copy over pictures and documents, now you can format and remove the old drive.
Martin

Replying helps further our knowledge, without comment leaves us wondering.

 

[buczacz]

I also need help with MaxBlast-3. The BIOS on my Asus P5A motherboard does not recognize HDD > 34 MByte. The machine currently has 21 GByte drive. I just bought new Maxtor 40 GByte drive. I want to make a mirror copy of the 20 GByte drive, so if I screw up the software, I can go back to the old version. (I might add that I'm going to all this trouble because Asus machine hosts very essential software that I can't get to run on my new Pentium IV machine. )

MaxBlast-3 is supposed to make it possible to get around the 34 GByte limit. Using MaxBlast-3, and putting the 20 GB on Primary IDE and 40 GM on Secondary IDE, I split the 40 GB HDD into two partitions 21 GB & 19 GB, and copied the 20 GB boot drive to the 21 GB partition supposedly including the system files. Subsequently casual examination of the new 21 GB partition indicated that it seemed to have copies of all the files from the old 20 GB drive. I then sought to use the new drive to boot the system by connecting it to the Primary IDE. The secondary IDE was reconnected to the CD ROM.

No adjustmets of BIOS HDD settings (AUTO, MANUAL, NONE) could get the system to boot. I assume that MaxBlast-3 installed its Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO) on the new 21 GB partition, but I'm not sure. How do I check? What did I do wrong?

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[syskplim]

hi,

try to format ur 120Gb in FAT32 first. u can divide it into 2 or more partitions. then use norton ghost to clone the whole partition from ur old hd to new hdd. make sure the new hdd works after cloned than use CONVERT command to convert it to NTFS.


With kind regards.
syskplim@streamyx.com