Need help with hard drive transfer...

[red91]

Got a new hard drive and need to swap info over from the old one.

Computers are currently connected and am wondering if I can simply COPY one hard drive to the other.

 

[Ralph]

What are you trying to do? Do you want to replace the current hard drive with the new one? Is there something wrong with your old hard drive? If the old drive is still good, keep it. Leave your OS and applications on it and copy your files to the new drive. If it's flacky and you need to replace it, use Norton Ghost to copy the data from the old drive to the new one.

 

[IH8RDS]

I'm assuming windows. I would slave inthe old drive and and just pick and choose what you want. If its in two different computers use a crossover cable. If they are on a network, just make shur they are in the same workgroup
goto run
type in \\COMPUTER NAME\c$
that will give you full access to the other drive

 

[red91]

What are you trying to do? Do you want to replace the current hard drive with the new one? Is there something wrong with your old hard drive? If the old drive is still good, keep it. Leave your OS and applications on it and copy your files to the new drive. If it's flacky and you need to replace it, use Norton Ghost to copy the data from the old drive to the new one.

have one with more capacity, and was hoping a simply "copy" would work so I can just do the transfer, and then install....

 

[Starscream]

have one with more capacity, and was hoping a simply "copy" would work so I can just do the transfer, and then install....

You can do that, but it'll take a while depending on how much data you have. I had to transfer about 30 gigs worth of files to a 200 gig I use for media files when my 40 started filling up. It took a very, very long time. I've never used Norton Ghost before, but I've heard good things.

If your old drive is still in good shape, use it to run the OS and apps, then use the larger drive to store all your media. It usually seeks faster that way, it's easier to organize and defrag, and if your OS drive happens to burn up (which mine did) you won't lose all that media. If you media drive fails, then you can at least still fix it without having to reload anything.

 

[red91]

what I'm thinking though is that the old hard drive 6 gig, is about 65% full.

Its an older laptop, but still works for what I need it to do. Have a 20 gig HD that I was hoping to transfer all the data to, thinking, that it might help increase its speed a little and run some other programs that I have.

Wanted to try a dual OS steup between Windows, and a version of linux.

When I try and copy I get a "cannot copy PAGEFILE" error almost right off the bat.

 

[Starscream]

what I'm thinking though is that the old hard drive 6 gig, is about 65% full.

Its an older laptop, but still works for what I need it to do. Have a 20 gig HD that I was hoping to transfer all the data to, thinking, that it might help increase its speed a little and run some other programs that I have.

Wanted to try a dual OS steup between Windows, and a version of linux.

When I try and copy I get a "cannot copy PAGEFILE" error almost right off the bat.

Are you just selecting the entire drive to be copied while the computer is on? If you want to copy the entire drive, OS and all, you'll need to use another computer. The OS cannot relocate, modify, or delete files that it's using.

 

[IH8RDS]

Are you just selecting the entire drive to be copied while the computer is on? If you want to copy the entire drive, OS and all, you'll need to use another computer. The OS cannot relocate, modify, or delete files that it's using.

true statement.

 

[red91]

Are you just selecting the entire drive to be copied while the computer is on? If you want to copy the entire drive, OS and all, you'll need to use another computer. The OS cannot relocate, modify, or delete files that it's using.

ok. I currently have an external hard drive case that the new HD is in.

If it wont let me copy the files to it, would it let me copy them to another computer??

My train of thought is that it would copy them to an external spot. Unfortunately I just looked and the OS is just the upgrade version not full. Otherwise I could have just copied that to the HD and then worked out the rest.

You tell me...

Thanks for the help so far....appreciate it as always.

 

[RichP]

You need to specify what you are trying to accomplish a bit more.
One laptop with an internal small drive and an external large drive. Are you planning on moving the entire old drive over to the newer one ?
There are two things, one is a copy or xcopy, xcopy at the command line works much better however it won't copy open files that the OS is using. Boot with a floppy that has xcopy.exe on it then run xcopy from the 'a' drive, whoops, that won't work without USB support, Norton ghost.
If you plan on cloning the new hard drive, pulling the old one and replacing it with the new one you want 'norton ghost' at which time you will make a ghost boot floppy with USB support [which you have version1.1 usb, very slow] at which point you will boot norton ghost boot floppy, let it load [about 2 minutes or so] then you will do an image copy disc to disc, it will ask you if you want to use the whole new drive and you say yes or no, yes it will clone the OS and all the files onto the new drive and it will be bootable, no and it will create a 6gb partition and again make a bootable drive, from there you can use fdisk [assuming you are using win98] or disc manager [2000 and XP] to make additional partitions/drives. More detail....

 

[Starscream]

ok. I currently have an external hard drive case that the new HD is in.

If it wont let me copy the files to it, would it let me copy them to another computer??

My train of thought is that it would copy them to an external spot. Unfortunately I just looked and the OS is just the upgrade version not full. Otherwise I could have just copied that to the HD and then worked out the rest.

You tell me...

Thanks for the help so far....appreciate it as always.

You could copy them to another computer, but the HD that you are copying canNOT be operating the OS.

Here's what I would do:

Install your OS onto the new drive
Slave the old drive to the new one
Make a folder in the new drive somewhere
Copy the old drive into that folder
Delete the OLD OS folder(s)

Now you'll have the new drive powering the OS and all the old info too.

One problem you may run into after installing the OS on the new drive is that when you slave the old drive and boot up, it may give you a message saying you have dual OSs. It should let you select which drive to boot from, so select the 20gig. Then just follow the steps I listed above.

Keep in mind, there are always little factors that could make this not work. It takes trial and error. Hopefully this will work for you.

 

[red91]

You need to specify what you are trying to accomplish a bit more.
One laptop with an internal small drive and an external large drive. Are you planning on moving the entire old drive over to the newer one ?
....

Yes. That is it.

 

[RichP]

Yes. That is it.

but if you have anymore ideas thats cool too. :thumbup:

You can't do that, your system is too old to boot off an external USB drive. You need to keep the OS on the internal drive UNLESS you bought an external laptop drive and it's in one of those small external latop enclosures and you plan on physically exchanging them once the ghosting is done.
The only way to move the entire old hard drive over to the new one is with ghost, then you can remove the old drive physically from the laptop and put the new one in it's place. The other issue you are going to run into is bios compatability, ballpark guess from the size of the existing hard drive is probably about 18GB, you may have to go to the manufacturers web site of the laptop and grab the latest bios and flash yours.
Me, I'd pull both laptop drives, put two eide adapters on them, hook them to one of my workbench PC's and ghost one to the other in 8 minutes and be done with it. I use laptop drives in all my ITX machines that I build.

 

[red91]

Got it.

Thanks.

 

[red91]

great....new dilema. I put all the stuff together to clean up the hard ddive...and the system can't find it.

all hooked up and everything.

damn damn damn !

 

[mdl]

I'm assuming windows. I would slave inthe old drive and and just pick and choose what you want. If its in two different computers use a crossover cable. If they are on a network, just make shur they are in the same workgroup
goto run
type in \\COMPUTER NAME\c$
that will give you full access to the other drive

You mean use a crossover to connect 2 machines together right...

Just clarifying it for him.

 

[red91]

You mean use a crossover to connect 2 machines together right...

Just clarifying it for him.

this sucks !!!! so I unplug it from my laptop and put it on the main computer at work, it says "found new hardware" acknowledges it as a mass storage device and still will not let me access it or show it under control panel.

But it will show the CD burner I have.....WTF ????

Could it be that it is not partitioned or something ???

 

[Starscream]

this sucks !!!! so I unplug it from my laptop and put it on the main computer at work, it says "found new hardware" acknowledges it as a mass storage device and still will not let me access it or show it under control panel.

But it will show the CD burner I have.....WTF ????

Could it be that it is not partitioned or something ???

Is this XP that you are using at work?

If so (and this may apply to 2000, I'm not sure),

Right click My Computer
Click Manage
On the left, click Device Manager
On the main window, click the + next to Disk Drives
Click the HDD you just installed

If it has a yellow ! next to it, right click and select properties. There should be a window that pops up and tells you what the system thinks the problem is.

Hope that helps...

 

[RichP]

Boot the laptop, make sure the external USB drive is turned on, plug it into the laptop, you should see a usb icon appear in the lower right corner of windows, down near the clock/time. If it's not there you need to install USB support, if it's a windows 95 to 98 upgrade it may not be there, the upgrade is win98 first edition not SE or ME and they did not have much to do with USB way back then.
Go to the site of whoever the drive is made by and pull down the drivers for the USB drive. Install the drivers. Before installing the new USB drivers unplug the USB drive then install them with the installer that came with the drivers. You will have to probably reboot, wait for it to come up and then once it's running plug in the external drive and turn it on. At that point it should discover, build a driver data base and you should be good to go.

 

[red91]

Is this XP that you are using at work?

If so (and this may apply to 2000, I'm not sure),

Right click My Computer
Click Manage
On the left, click Device Manager
On the main window, click the + next to Disk Drives
Click the HDD you just installed

If it has a yellow ! next to it, right click and select properties. There should be a window that pops up and tells you what the system thinks the problem is.

Hope that helps...

doesn't even show under HDD...

But under USB controllers it is recognized as a mass storage device...

but the damn thing won't show up in my computer.
aaarrrrrrrgggghhhh!!! !!!