Hard drive copy

ITIMAN · Post by **ITIMAN** » Tue May 11, 2004 8:54 pm

OK, I have a 80 Gig drive and I used to have a 10 gig drive. Well the 10G was giving me boot up problems and so I copied the entire disk to my 80G. Question: Other than the obvious what do I need to keep on the 10 G. Do I need the WINDOWS file. I know to keep what I want to keep but whatever is used to boot up the machine, can I delete those files. This will free up some space on my 80 Gig.. Any ideas on what to delete?> Thanks ITIMAN <img src="http://members.cox.net/ccraig3/itiman6.jpg" style="border:0;"/>

Ambush Bug · Post by **Ambush Bug** » Wed May 12, 2004 1:50 am

Well, from your description, it's unknown if you have installed Windows on the new drive yet. That said, my own personal preference when transferring stuff from an smaller old drive to a larger new drive is to do the following (assuming regular plain ol' IDE, not SATA): Make the old drive a slave on any available controller. Take the new drive and make it the master on the first IDE controller. Boot off Windows disk (floppy, CD, etc.), format the new drive and install a fresh copy of Windows on it. Then, make approrpiate folders on the new drive and transfer everything I want to keep from the old drive. TIP: Hooking up the old drive to a different IDE controller than the new drive speeds up this process significantly. Folders to watch for: "WINDOWS": Not that you need a bunch of stuff from here, but if you've got any custom screensavers or wallpapers, they're usually in here somewhere. (look for *.scr for screensavers, and dig around for *.bmp or *.gif for your wallpapers) "My Documents" (Win9X): Usually located in the root folder of the drive, this one's got all the contents of the MyDocs folder in it. Grab and transfer to new drive. "Documents And Settings\<USERNAME>" (Win2000, WinXP): Definitely do some digging in here. Your IE favories are in here as a folder, as are the contents of your desktop ("Desktop" folder), along with the MyDocs folder and its contents. Outlook and Outlook Express store their stuff here by default, as I recall, though you will have to dig for it. If you use WinXP or Win2K, I heartily recommend changing the default location of the "My Documents" folder to someplace that's not nearly so hard to get at. (Don't do this at work, it pisses off your network admins) Just find the My Documents folder in the Start Menu, right-click it, and you can set a new location with the provided field. Me, I've got a drive that exclusively for documents of all types, and I redirect MyDocs there on every install. Saves me a lot of trouble when it comes time to back it all up... just .zip the whole thing, divide into convenient 650MB chunks, and burn 'em to disk. (Or actually hand-sort everything if I'm feeling tedious.) --- In my own personal experience, I don't like attempting to transfer an install of Windows from an old drive to a new one. I know it can be done, yes, but frankly, it isn't worth the time or trouble for me. Of course, having a copy of Ghost with an image all ready-to-go alleviates this problem.

MegaDeath70 · Post by **MegaDeath70** » Wed May 12, 2004 10:46 am

Sheesh all that info ! <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/smile.gif ALT=":)"> After you have copied all the files you want just simply format it through windows and its all clean ! <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/laugh.gif ALT=":lol"> <div style="text-align:center"><img src="http://www.limalan.org/images/Sigs/Mega ... </div><div style="text-align:center">"MegaDeath //Definition: [n] the death of a million people; "they calibrate the effects of atom bombs in megadeaths" :-)!"</div>

ITIMAN · Post by **ITIMAN** » Fri May 14, 2004 9:34 pm

Bug,. I have been booting off of my 80G for long time I currently boot up now with it, I just copied the whole file folder structure to my 80G. I was just wondering what file folders to keep from that 10G hard drive. I will go through and start deleting stuff. I dont think my computer is using any of those files for OS operation. Thanks for you help!!! ITIMAN <img src="http://members.cox.net/ccraig3/itiman6.jpg" style="border:0;"/>

XMEN Ashaman DTM · Post by **XMEN Ashaman DTM** » Fri May 14, 2004 10:48 pm

ITI: if you did a straight copy, then you may not have your boot sectors on your 80GB hdd. Probably the quickest way to check that would be to disable the 10GB drive in your BIOS (or physically unplug its power and data cables before you turn your machine on). If it boots and everything functions fine (read, write, execute, not hangups when you start a program), then you are good to go. If nothing happens when you boot, or it gives a "disk not found" error, then you know that you pretty much have to reformat and install windows on it. If you did a straight copy, then it's possible that you are still booting off the 10 GB drive. Again, you'd have to disable the 10 GB drive to check that. That would be the first order of business, IMO. Then you can do all that stuff that Bug described. And you'll need to if you want to keep anything on your 80 GB drive. When I put a new drive in and need to install the OS to the new drive, I usually just hunt down all the files I want to keep, burn em to a disc with the directory structure intact, and transfer them over to the new drive via cd. OR When I used to have my file-server machine set up, I would send all the data I wanted to keep over to the other computer via the network. After double-checking that I had everything off that I wanted to save, I'd put the new drive in and install the OS. Once that was done, I'd update the OS and transfer files off the server. It was quicker doing the network transfer when I saved 12 GB of mp3's so I didn't have to copy all my CD's again. <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/happy.gif ALT=":D">

Hard drive copy

Hard drive copy

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Re: Hard drive copy