Anyone here experienced in SATA HDDS, replacing one of two?

EvilHorace · Post by **EvilHorace** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 7:37 pm

Seems to cover it well. I'll try the controller first.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 8:49 pm

The issue is that your mobo's controller does not support SATA2 and unfortunately that drive does not have a SATA1 legacy jumper, so yeah the controller is the only hope.

The controller will make this a bit tricky. There are 2 ways you can do this, a simple way or the hard way.

The simple way is just keep the old C drive as the boot drive leaving it on the old controller, connect the new drive to the new controller. Start installing and storing everything to the new drive from now on. All apps and games have a custom option to change the default install directory. My game partition is the H drive and that's where I install all my games. It's no big deal. You can also move your entire Documents folder to the new drive: right click on the "My Documents" icon, select Properties, click the Move button. Create or select a folder on the new drive (call it "My Documents" for convenience although it can be called anything) and click apply. Windows will ask if you want to move the contents of the old Docs folder to the new one. Say yes. From now on your "My Documents" folder will live on the new drive. Windows will know where to find it.

The harder way is to copy everything to the new drive and replace the old drive with it. You will want to install the new controller then boot into windows with the old drive only (still connected to the mobo NOT the new controller). Windows will detect the new controller and ask for the drivers. Once the drivers are installed you can shut down the computer, and connect the new drive to the new controller. Now boot with a drive cloning app disk (from the drive manufacturer, or use Acronis or Ghost) to clone the old drive to the new one. Then disconnect the old drive and try booting.

Chances are 50-50 that it will boot into Windows, recognize the new drive, and probably request a reboot to finalize. If so you're good to go.

More likely you will get a BSOD because Windows can't find the boot drive in the right memory address (the address of the new controller will be different than the old one). In that case you're going to have to boot from an XP CD, go to the recovery console and type FIXBOOT at the command line, then hit return. Then try rebooting again. If it still fails to boot you'll have to perform a repair install of Windows.

Hope this helps...

EvilHorace · Post by **EvilHorace** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 8:58 pm

Right now the biggest space culprit on my C drive is everything that's in my Programs file and Steam (actually Valve -18gb) has alot to do with as it
defaults to that. I'm not sure if all the Steam stuff would work correctly if moved to a D drive, but wish that could be done. I normally like keeping my games on another drive.

EvilHorace · Post by **EvilHorace** » Wed Dec 10, 2008 7:06 am

OK, my controller came yesterday. I first installed its drivers. I then used a program to copy the old C drive to the new HDD and it works, no problems except that now, Windows only see's it as being the exact same size as the original drive.
The bios see's it as being 931gb but not Windows. Any ideas?

I didn't format the new drive first, is that it?

Once I get past that detail (even if re-copying, no big deal), what's the best way to then copy my files on the my other 70gb (D drive) to the new larger C drive? All that's there is games and my photos. Should I create a partition and call it D or just copy/paste the files into the new C drive? Will it really matter short of re-doing shortcuts?

eGoCeNTRoNiX · Post by **eGoCeNTRoNiX** » Wed Dec 10, 2008 9:39 am

Right click on "My Computer" then click on "Manage" Then go to "Disk Management" What does it say about the drive there? If it just says that the space is unpartitioned, you could use a program like Partition Magic to increase the size of the partition to use the rest of the space and you're done. Hope this helps.

eGo

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Wed Dec 10, 2008 11:46 am

Yup, just need to extend the partition. Partition Magic is my friend.

b-man1 · Post by **b-man1** » Wed Dec 10, 2008 5:55 pm

EvilHorace wrote:Right now the biggest space culprit on my C drive is everything that's in my Programs file and Steam (actually Valve -18gb) has alot to do with as it
defaults to that. I'm not sure if all the Steam stuff would work correctly if moved to a D drive, but wish that could be done. I normally like keeping my games on another drive.

i'm new to Steam (less than a week using it now) and already moved from one drive to another. i didn't realize when i installed it that it would also store all the downloaded games in the same directory...so i wanted to move it to a larger drive.

all i did was:

1. copy the entire steam folder to a backup drive and rename it "steam_old" or similar
2. uninstall steam
3. reinstall steam and point it to the drive you want
4. log in to your account for the first time
5. close steam
6. rename new steam folder to something different
7. copy backed up steam_old folder to the new location and rename to "steam"
8. delete clientregistry.blob in the steam folder
9. launch steam and log in again
10. all should be well

i'm sure there are other ways to do this...just sharing what worked for me.

EvilHorace · Post by **EvilHorace** » Wed Dec 10, 2008 8:51 pm

I discovered that the unused space was an "unallocated" partition and so I had to then format that space.
Doing that then created another partition and that's now my new D drive however I really NEED a huge C drive (still that partition is almost full) and don't really need two partitions.

I'd like to merge the two partitions but the SW program I've used so far apparently can't do that.

I DL'd and tryed to run the trial version of Partition Magic 8.0 but I get an error that "partition drive letter can't be identified" the moment I start the program. Windows see's two, C and D.

Any ideas what else I can use to just merge the two partitions so I have one large C drive instead of two partitions?

b-man1 · Post by **b-man1** » Wed Dec 10, 2008 9:39 pm

vista and server 2008 let you extend partitions via the disk management gui. in XP and other OS versions, you can use DISKPART. just search on MS Support for the instructions, but it's straightforward. you will want to delete that new D:\ partition though...you can only extend into adjacent, raw space.

BUT...i just realized you probably can't do this on your system/boot partition. SO...you could image the c:\ drive and then reimage/resize via your imaging utility (it should let you specify a new partition size).

edit...here are a few links regarding diskpart

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr ... 66465.aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325590

regarding partition magic 8...it may not recognize your sata drives if the BIOS is configured for RAID instead of IDE mode.

Executioner · Post by **Executioner** » Wed Dec 10, 2008 10:29 pm

What if you were to format your new drive using Manage first, then use the utility to copy over the old drive again?

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Thu Dec 11, 2008 12:36 am

Partition Magic is all you need.

EvilHorace · Post by **EvilHorace** » Thu Dec 11, 2008 7:02 am

With my 2nd older HDD installed (was D drive), Partition Magic works but it then doesn't identify the new HDD correctly. It shows the first C drive but that has no label and just says "disk 1" with its used space, highlighted in blue. Partition Magic doesn't seem to give me any options as to how to convert this to NTFS or merge it.

I don't know what to do with that now.

It shows the 2nd partitions space but it's listed as "BAD". Apparently needs to be formatted?

My older D drive is listed as NTFS as it should be.

EvilHorace · Post by **EvilHorace** » Thu Dec 11, 2008 8:57 am

So...................Although the new drive obviously works, things aren't as they should be.

Can anyone here give me a step by step guide as to how to re-do this, copying my original C drive so that it'll be as it should be with ONE large C drive?

Swipe the new drive somehow, like "partition" or Fdisk it (even though Fdisk is old hat now)?

How then can I copy my existing C drive completely and be able to use the remainder of space?

I know people must do this all the time so it can't be that hard.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Thu Dec 11, 2008 9:09 am

For copying the old drive data to the new drive you just need a drive cloning utility: Acronis TrueImage, Norton Ghost, or download the free one from the drive manufacturer's website. Doesn't matter what's on the new drive right now - it'll be overwritten during the cloning.

All these cloning programs give you an option to automatically resize the partitions to fill the new drive.

EvilHorace · Post by **EvilHorace** » Thu Dec 11, 2008 12:53 pm

OK thanks, I'll give that a shot tonight.