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poltr1 ([personal profile] poltr1) wrote2008-01-25 12:51 pm
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Upgrades, upgrades.....

I've been wanting to upgrade the 3 Gb hard drive in my laptop for a while.


Last week, I bought a 6 Gb hard drive on eBay. After it came in and I let it warm up overnight, I tried copying the contents of the old hard drive to the new hard drive, using Western Digital's Data Lifeguard product. It appeared to be successful, except for 17 files it wouldn't overwrite. Then I tried putting in the new hard drive. Windows started, but it went to the DOS screen. I tried to start Windows manually, but it said that HIMEM.SYS was missing. Argh.

The next day, I tried reinstalling Windows 98. That made things even worse. Double argh.

Last night, I took out the hard drive, deleted everything from the new hard drive, and attempted to copy the files again. This time, only 10 files wouldn't copy. Most of them were system files at the top-level directory. A brute-force XCOPY took care of them, along with transferring the system from a boot diskette. (Yes, I still use floppies.)

The laptop is working fine now. I'm happy.


Lessons learned: 1) Make sure I start with a clean disk, including any hidden system files. 2) It's ideal to take out the hard drives and hook them up to another machine to perform the copy. 3) Give it lots of time.

Now I wish XP Home had an FDISK command to take care of disk work. It doesn't. And my copy of PartitionMagic doesn't work on XP. :( [Updated 22:23] PartitionMagic does indeed work on XP; I need to call the NT flavor and not the 9x flavor.

Shout-outs: Happy birthday [livejournal.com profile] calamitysam!
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[identity profile] bikergeek.livejournal.com 2008-01-25 06:05 pm (UTC)(link)
Have you considered keeping a Knoppix CD around as a rescue CD? That'll give you enough tools to boot the PC and a working command-line from which you can run Linux's FDISK and mkfs, both of which will create and format FAT16 and FAT32 partitions. After that you can use Unix tar to copy the entire directory tree from one disk to another.

[identity profile] redaxe.livejournal.com 2008-01-25 06:28 pm (UTC)(link)
The only potential problem with that is that XP users are likely to have formatted their drives to NTFS, rather than FAT(16 or 32). At that point, especially if a drive is set up as a single partition (as I would, with only 6GB to play with), the only thing that can be done is blow it away. Doubleplus ungood.

[identity profile] filkergem.livejournal.com 2008-01-26 07:33 pm (UTC)(link)
Actually, there is a stable read/write driver for linux and other operating systems. http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ says that it was released in Feb 2007, and is available in something like 130 different distributions, including Knoppix, Debian, Ubuntu.

[identity profile] redaxe.livejournal.com 2008-01-26 08:00 pm (UTC)(link)
Excellent; I can go get it for the Ubuntu playground system I have prepared (but not running at the moment; lack of physical space) and use it to examine found hard drives. Thanks!
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[personal profile] poltr1 2008-01-26 03:20 am (UTC)(link)
I'm gonna have to give this a try. The Management Console in XP doesn't let me delete non-DOS partitions.

[identity profile] redaxe.livejournal.com 2008-01-25 06:30 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm surprised XP Home doesn't have FDISK in it; I would have thought it did (Start > Run > CMD to open a DOS window, then FDISK, no?), at which point I'd build a rescue CD and boot from that long enough to do the partition work. Absent that, I might look for an older copy of something like Partition Magic to cope. I also HIGHLY recommend Acronis TrueImage for backups (I got it initially because it didn't require the .NET framework to be installed, and it's great) and building rescue boot discs and the like.
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[personal profile] poltr1 2008-01-26 03:21 am (UTC)(link)
It does, but it's been moved to the Management Console. See dragon_pet's thread.

[identity profile] redaxe.livejournal.com 2008-01-26 04:47 am (UTC)(link)
Fascinating. I use the DOS window all the time in XP Pro, though not FDISK. Ah, well, such is life for a fossil like me.

[identity profile] dragon-pet.livejournal.com 2008-01-25 07:08 pm (UTC)(link)
Ever poke around Start/Control panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management? Can do a lot from there.
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[personal profile] poltr1 2008-01-25 07:13 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh yeah. I keep forgetting about that. I'm used to the old-fashioned way of doing things.

[identity profile] dragon-pet.livejournal.com 2008-01-25 07:34 pm (UTC)(link)
Me too.. but I had the new stuff drilled into my head. Though I don't know squat about vista. How rude they come out with new stuff right when I graduate. Pppfft.
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[personal profile] poltr1 2008-01-25 08:56 pm (UTC)(link)
That's Microsoft for ya. Always rolling out new products. (But at least it keeps their programmers employed.)

I'm perfectly happy with last year's model, and last year's software. Besides, it's cheaper that way. :)

[identity profile] fuzzyvanman.livejournal.com 2008-01-25 08:52 pm (UTC)(link)
On XP, there's also the recovery console for lower level work:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058
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[personal profile] poltr1 2008-01-25 08:57 pm (UTC)(link)
That's right, I forgot about that too. I think I used it once.
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