Hard Drive Question

K

King of Creation

Vault Fossil
So I want to get another hard drive. Circuit City is having a sale on 250 gig hard drives, and I want to replace my current main hard drive(80 gig) with the 250 gig one. What I'd like to know is if there is a way to basically copy my old hard drive to the new one, so that all the drivers, operating system, etc is on the new one...so the computer will be able to run off the new on like it ran off the old one. Any suggestions?
 
Heck, just put your new one in as primary slave. It'll make little to no difference in the speed of your new HD.
 
Or just insert the new one as primary slave, then download one of the softwares from the HDDs developer which should include the option to copy the entire drive to the new one..

Jebus said:
Heck, just put your new one in as primary slave. It'll make little to no difference in the speed of your new HD.
Click to expand...

It will however have an effect on your OS speed, because the main OS drive is used more than the other drives. Best idea is to have the fastest drive as the OS drive.
 
Jebus said:
That mainly depends on the rpm, not the size, though.
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Tru dat, and also access speed of course. But that usually falls under rpm.
 
I have a somewhat related question:
What does everyone need a 250 gig HD for? Do people store lots of movies? A huge amount of music? Install every game/program they have and leave them there?

See, I have an 80 gig HD, but I've never come close to filling it. Perhaps a 120 gig one could be useful if you stretch it a little, but 250 just seems pointless.

I'm not having a go, I'm just genuinely confused.
 
In my case, that would be huge amounts of music. I've got a 160 gig and I'm struggling to maintain free space.
 
keep in mind that some systems have a hard time recognizing drives over 120Gb as the OS drive.

Big T said:
*snip*
Click to expand...

atm:

12Gb: OS & few apps
15Gb: personal shite
25Gb: installed applications & software development platforms
25Gb: installed games
30Gb: music
120Gb: general leech (movies, appz, games)

basically i always succeed in filling up whatever harddrives i've got. this list is just this pc though & not my backup pc or external harddrives :)

PS: your old av was much better T
 
SuAside said:
basically i always succeed in filling up whatever harddrives i've got. this list is just this pc though & not my backup pc or external harddrives :)
Click to expand...
Hmmm, I guess I must just clean out the old/unused/rarely used stuff more often.
Do you use all those games/apps often? Or do you just never uninstall stuff?
I tend to get rid of things that I never use, I don't like them cluttering things up.
120Gb: general leech (movies, appz, games)
Click to expand...
Any movies I have I tend to burn to CDRs, again, to stop them causing clutter.
PS: your old av was much better T
Click to expand...
What? Don't you like looking at my ugly mug?
 
Corpse said:
If you really want to replace your old one for some reason or another though, I'd recommend you get yourself a copy of Symantec Ghost.

http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/
Click to expand...

Meh, Ghost is a good program but I really don't see the need for it. Western Digital offers free software that can do the same job, ie copy one drive to another one. I guess other HDD producers also has this, if not just download from WD (my choice in HDDs, eventho I've gotten several bad ones).
 
So I was thinking...If I install this new hard drive and copy all the files and everything, would all of the directories be corrupt on the new hard drive? Or would the new hard drive assume the C: status?
 
"Copying" a system HDD is a bad idea unless/even if you got the tools for it (which usually requires the new HDD being of the same size AFAIK).

Generally the best idea if you're on some version of Windows is to completely reinstall the OS any time you replace a major system component (system HDD, graphics card, motherboard, CPU, ...).
 
King of Creation said:
So I was thinking...If I install this new hard drive and copy all the files and everything, would all of the directories be corrupt on the new hard drive? Or would the new hard drive assume the C: status?
Click to expand...

They won't be corrupt of course, I've done this many times. You will be guided by the program to switch the drives after it has rebooted and copied the files, and then you just insert it as the primary master.. and voila..

Ashmo said:
"Copying" a system HDD is a bad idea unless/even if you got the tools for it (which usually requires the new HDD being of the same size AFAIK).
Click to expand...

Not true, but it has to be bigger of course. Or I would at least recommend it.

Ashmo said:
Generally the best idea if you're on some version of Windows is to completely reinstall the OS any time you replace a major system component (system HDD, graphics card, motherboard, CPU, ...).
Click to expand...

Again not true, the only time I would recommend this is when you install a new motherboard, all of the other components are easilly replaced.
 
Depends. Depending on how suicidal your copy of Windows is it will take offense no matter WHICh component you replace -- motherboard, HDD, CD burner, RAM, floppy disk. Windows tends to commit suicide for all kinds of reasons.

Actually my suggestion would be to uninstall Windows (oh, wait, you can't! just format the harddrive then) and install Linux or another Unix-derivate, but that's a bit off.
 
Ashmo said:
Depends. Depending on how suicidal your copy of Windows is it will take offense no matter WHICh component you replace -- motherboard, HDD, CD burner, RAM, floppy disk. Windows tends to commit suicide for all kinds of reasons.
Click to expand...
The difference is of course how many drivers/dll files and such the actual hardware is connected to, a motherboard is the worst of the bunch.. But it is true that it *is* possible to replace all components.

Ashmo said:
Actually my suggestion would be to uninstall Windows (oh, wait, you can't! just format the harddrive then) and install Linux or another Unix-derivate, but that's a bit off.
Click to expand...

hehe, well that's a different story all together. I don't like MS, but I do like XP Pro.
 
Yeah, I like XP Pro too except for the fact it's NT and as such does not have any decent console anymore at all.
MS DOS wasn't much but now you're as fucked as a MacOS user if something goes wrong and your OS ceases functioning.

But hey, even tho there's a lack of decent DOS based recover utility XP tends to work again if you just reinstall it over the old copy.
That's how I recovered my system when the SP2 installation went wrong and wrecked the entire OS.

And lastly there's always the MS DOS bootdisk I keep for emergencies.

Oh and I'm using the classic skin of course. The NT5.1 default look is a war crime. Well, at least it should be one. If I wanted plastic bubbles I'd be using an iMac with MacOS X.
 
Big T said:
I have a somewhat related question:
What does everyone need a 250 gig HD for? Do people store lots of movies? A huge amount of music? Install every game/program they have and leave them there?
Click to expand...

Here are the hard drives that I have:

120GB SATA
120GB SATA (both are in a non-RAID configuration)
80GB
40GB
160GB external hard drive and they all have like 1%-6% of empty space on them except for my external hard drive and my 80GB hard drive, they have like around 15% space that is empty on them.
 
Ive got a 40GB HD with 13GB free. I might upgrade eventualy, but Im more likley to just get a new laptop by then.
 
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