Upgrades, upgrades.....

[poltr1]

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 calamitysam!

Comments

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

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.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

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.

[dragon-pet.livejournal.com]

Ever poke around Start/Control panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management? Can do a lot from there.

[fuzzyvanman.livejournal.com]

On XP, there's also the recovery console for lower level work:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058