Misadventures in upgrading.......
Mar. 2nd, 2003 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poltr1Last summer, I bought an 80 Gb hard drive. It was definitely more than I needed at the time, but keeping Parkinson's Law of Data in mind -- data expands to the amount of hard drive space allotted to it -- I knew it would be sufficient for my needs for at least 3-5 years -- even with data redundancy.
Late last fall, I finally installed it into an external drive enclosure, which I purchased in the spring. A local computer supplier sells external drive enclosures (with a USB 2.0 connection) for just under $100 -- you install the hard drive, CD-R, CD-RW, etc. I highly recommend these devices -- they're portable, convenient, and --unlike their sealed counterparts they sell at CompUSA -- upgradable! (Now they have them in FireWire as well.)
BTW, I often tell people, backup early and often, because all hard drives are built with Murphy's Law as a design spec. So far, I've been lucky (knock on wood), and haven't experienced a catastrophic loss of data yet.
After connecting the external 80 Gb drive to my main machine and using it for system backups for a few months, I thought I could transfer the files from the old hard drive (a Seagate 10 Gb) to the new drive. So I wrote a transition plan, did some disk repartitioning (PowerQuest's Partition Magic is a wonderful utility!), and started to move both my data and application partitions last weekend. I also bought another PowerQuest utility -- DriveCopy (a little cheaper and less deluxe than DriveImage) -- to do the grunt work for me for the system partition. It required me to connect the second hard drive to one of the internal cables. Since all my drive bays were full, I disconnected my CD-RW drive and connected the hard drive.
Then the unthinkable happened. My system (which is three years old) could not recognize the new hard drive. Every time I rebooted, the system froze when it tried to autodetect the new hard drive. As it turns out, the disk parameters and geometry were unknown to the system BIOS, which only recognized hard drives as large as 32 Gb. Bottom line: the disk was literally too big to install in my system.
So I then tried to manually move the files back to the original drive. It took an entire Sunday. And after the move, not all of the programs worked. For example, Adobe Acrobat crashed when I try to start it.
I got the system somewhat working again, and checked the drive manufacturer's website. (It's a Western Digital drive.) I can add a second jumper to trick the BIOS into detecting it as a smaller disk, but I'd need some special software (Data Lifeguard) to use the entire hard drive, which I downloaded from their website. I then tried to reinstall the drive with the added jumper. It succeeded-- it detected a 32 Gb hard drive -- but I couldn't get the Data Lifeguard software to work. Great -- there's 48 Gb I can't get to. So I rolled back the change yet again, and reinstalled the 80 Gb drive in its external enclosure. I also restored my files from the latest backup.
After running Symantec's Norton System Works' WinDoctor, I was able to fix a lot of the registry problems that occured when I moved my applications. But it's still not completely back to normal. For those applications that still don't work, I may need to reinstall them.
But I'd still like to upgrade the old hard drive. My next plan of action is to purchase a 40 Gb drive, install the extra jumper, backup the existing data (just in case), and then try to install the new drive. Wish me [good] luck.
Late last fall, I finally installed it into an external drive enclosure, which I purchased in the spring. A local computer supplier sells external drive enclosures (with a USB 2.0 connection) for just under $100 -- you install the hard drive, CD-R, CD-RW, etc. I highly recommend these devices -- they're portable, convenient, and --unlike their sealed counterparts they sell at CompUSA -- upgradable! (Now they have them in FireWire as well.)
BTW, I often tell people, backup early and often, because all hard drives are built with Murphy's Law as a design spec. So far, I've been lucky (knock on wood), and haven't experienced a catastrophic loss of data yet.
After connecting the external 80 Gb drive to my main machine and using it for system backups for a few months, I thought I could transfer the files from the old hard drive (a Seagate 10 Gb) to the new drive. So I wrote a transition plan, did some disk repartitioning (PowerQuest's Partition Magic is a wonderful utility!), and started to move both my data and application partitions last weekend. I also bought another PowerQuest utility -- DriveCopy (a little cheaper and less deluxe than DriveImage) -- to do the grunt work for me for the system partition. It required me to connect the second hard drive to one of the internal cables. Since all my drive bays were full, I disconnected my CD-RW drive and connected the hard drive.
Then the unthinkable happened. My system (which is three years old) could not recognize the new hard drive. Every time I rebooted, the system froze when it tried to autodetect the new hard drive. As it turns out, the disk parameters and geometry were unknown to the system BIOS, which only recognized hard drives as large as 32 Gb. Bottom line: the disk was literally too big to install in my system.
So I then tried to manually move the files back to the original drive. It took an entire Sunday. And after the move, not all of the programs worked. For example, Adobe Acrobat crashed when I try to start it.
I got the system somewhat working again, and checked the drive manufacturer's website. (It's a Western Digital drive.) I can add a second jumper to trick the BIOS into detecting it as a smaller disk, but I'd need some special software (Data Lifeguard) to use the entire hard drive, which I downloaded from their website. I then tried to reinstall the drive with the added jumper. It succeeded-- it detected a 32 Gb hard drive -- but I couldn't get the Data Lifeguard software to work. Great -- there's 48 Gb I can't get to. So I rolled back the change yet again, and reinstalled the 80 Gb drive in its external enclosure. I also restored my files from the latest backup.
After running Symantec's Norton System Works' WinDoctor, I was able to fix a lot of the registry problems that occured when I moved my applications. But it's still not completely back to normal. For those applications that still don't work, I may need to reinstall them.
But I'd still like to upgrade the old hard drive. My next plan of action is to purchase a 40 Gb drive, install the extra jumper, backup the existing data (just in case), and then try to install the new drive. Wish me [good] luck.
