Pc hard drive info needed

[1BigDog]

I need some info from a real savvy computer person as my knowledge of the inner working of a PC are rather limited. Heres the situation: my original hard drive © was almost out of space. Its from a 2000 Dell PC with 1 G of ram (2 512 sticks), 4500 model I think with an 18.62 gb hard drive. A while ago my son-in-law installed a 233gb hard drive (E) in series with C drive, however I was never able to move stuff back and forth. I tried moving a large music library over from C to E but ended up losing the whole file. What I would like to do if its possible is to transfer my whole C drive contents over to the E drive, then remove the C drive and install the E drive back into the C connection, eliminating having two hard drives completely. Local PC store wants over 100 bucks to do this. Any suggestions? My music file has over 2000 songs so using a zip drive may not work. Keep it at the 5th grade level and ill be fine...LOL:think:

[Guest tx2sturgis]

If it was me, I'd take that $100 and buy a brandy new large capacity internal hard drive and it will come with some duplication software. You install it, boot from the included CD, set a few preferences, and it does all the duplication, making the new drive bootable. Then you move the new drive to the master position and reboot. Voila! Then use the 233G drive as a second drive and you got plenty of storage for a long time to come.

 

[BuddyRich]

Grab a portable 500gb usb drive and use it to move your files if the machine has a USB port.

[calperin]

Ruffy,

 

First at all, check if you have the original software that comes from Dell. Specifically the Operating System.

 

You will need to install the Operating SYstem on the big hard drive, then once it is everything working (including applications), you can put back the old hard drive as a second one, and then you can move all your files to the big HD.

 

The only problem with this is that you need to have all the software you have on the small HD, and you need to know how to install each piece of it.

 

Are you able to do that?

 

Carlos

[utadventure]

There is a program our IT department uses here called GHOST. They connect both the old drive and a new drive to the computer. Boot the computer using a CD and then with GHOST duplicate the old drive to the new drive. Then you have a completely new drive (larger usually) that contains your operating system and everything ready to go.

 

Dave

[LilBeaver]

Grab a portable 500gb usb drive and use it to move your files if the machine has a USB port.

Depending on the OS this could be an issue.

 

What version of windows are you running?

[V7Goose]

Just about any name brand hard drive comes with a disc that includes a utility to do exactly what you asked. And those utilities are available for download from the manufacturer's sites, too.

 

The process is pretty easy, but you shouldn't have had any problems with the new drive set up as you described, either, so I can't guarantee anything.

 

One caution - even though these things aren't too terribly difficult, they generally aren't for a novice, either. I'd find a friend who knows a thing or two to sit with you and try to do it together. Just talking about each step will help! And one other comment, that kinda goes with the caution - you mention the new drive was set up as E: - that almost certainly means the stock drive as a D: partition on it, probably a special recovery partition from Dell. When you do copy over the stock drive to the new one, you need to make sure to copy the WHOLE DRIVE, Not just the C: partition.

Goose

[SilvrT]

you mention the new drive was set up as E: - that almost certainly means the stock drive as a D: partition on it, probably a special recovery partition from Dell. When you do copy over the stock drive to the new one, you need to make sure to copy the WHOLE DRIVE, Not just the C: partition.

Goose

 

Not necessarilly (but probably). I have 2 drives on my home PC. One I use as my main drive running Vista. The other I use to play with different OS's. The main one is SATA and the other is IDE. I erased the partition on the IDE drive, disconnected the SATA drive and did a WinXP install. As I've done this a zillion times, I never paid a lot of attention to the text on the screen while it was setting up the drive and formatting it.... only later on I noticed that it set it up as H: drive. There was no C: drive connected per se` ... just the IDE hard drive. I think the process might have recognized my card reader's "virtual" drives first and then picked the next available drive...that being the H: drive.

 

Had I noticed this, I would have done the drive letter assignment before the setup continued.

 

Oh well... H: drive... C: drive... it's all "relevant".

 

I've had this happen before, a long time ago. I was able to successfully replace all instances of the wrong drive letter (in this case H in the registry with C: and re-define the active drive's letter to C: and reboot ... and everything worked and my drive was C: again. I would not recommend this to a novice tho.

 

BTW, those "recovery" partitions that Dell puts on are not recognized as drive letters within Windows.

[1BigDog]

So after reading the above posts and fully realizing that im probably one step below a novice as far as pc's go ill think ill just wait on this move until I can find someone locally to walk me through it. I did look into the GHOST program but its not formatted in a "PC for Dummies" mode. While I get the gist of most of the recommendations I also wouldnt know what to do if one of those windows pop up with that ominous ding and ask me what do I want to do.

 

Thanks, all

[ddoggma]

I would get a 1TB "Seagate" hard drive. Thats 1000gigs of space. Cost is about 100 bucks. It will come with Acronis true image, app. This is a great program and walks you thru the transfer. Its easyer than it sounds. Also the external USB hard drive will work too. Just drag and drop, all you music, pics, vids etc to that, leave the OS and any games on the main HD. I would burn a disk with all your pix on it every 6 month or so, Incase something bad happens to your computer. Super important pix double backed up on thumb drive and disk. Just incase. Keep one off site.

[SilvrT]

I would get a 1TB "Seagate" hard drive. Thats 1000gigs of space. Cost is about 100 bucks. It will come with Acronis true image, app. This is a great program and walks you thru the transfer. Its easyer than it sounds. Also the external USB hard drive will work too. Just drag and drop, all you music, pics, vids etc to that, leave the OS and any games on the main HD. I would burn a disk with all your pix on it every 6 month or so, Incase something bad happens to your computer. Super important pix double backed up on thumb drive and disk. Just incase. Keep one off site.

 

I just bought a Seagate 1TB external drive...didn't come with Acronis.

 

I will say though, that I use Acronis True Image software at work for all my backups, for creating images of workstations and servers, and for the odd time I have to clone a hard drive. It works great!

[BuddyRich]

Yep, Use Acronis True Image too. Works good for me. I now have an external 3.5/2.5 usb device for SATA drives. Just drop the drive in the correct size slot ,hook up the usb and start the cloning.

[SilvrT]

Maybe a little "technical" for some but with the following info, you can create a boot CD that includes various "utility" apps, including a disk cloning tool ....

 

http://www.runtime.org/peb.htm

 

The Bart PE is the one you want.

 

There are other free utilities on the net for creating a boot CD.

 

Here's a free utility for Imaging/cloning ... http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm

Edited November 10, 2009 by SilvrT

[spingley]

Ghost ghost ghost

[ddoggma]

OK, I thought I had a seagate in here. And it is...but its branded as a Maxtor. Seagate bought them out awhile back. It came with "Maxblast" says powered by Acronis in the software. Im guessing Seagate uses the same software. It's nice and easy. The one WD uses works well too. They all do.