Urgent! Hard drive about to die on me

robbie1876

Hi, I would very much appreciate some help with this, as I am not that technical! My primary C drive has been really struggling over the last few days and is about to give up the ghost. This morning it took me an hour to even get the bios to recognise it (I didn't particularly change anything, just kept rebooting). What I am concerned about is that the next time I try to boot, the C drive will be dead and I'll be snookered. Basically I want to move my OS to the D drive, take all my files off the C drive and physically remove it from my PC.

However, I have really no idea as to go about moving the OS to the D drive, so am looking for as much advice as I can. I reckon I won't be able to boot up from the C drive again, so I've got to do all this now, while the PC is on. Here's what I have:

AMD1000
256 RAM
C Drive: 10GB pile of crap, 7.5GB of files in use
D Drive: 40GB drive, 10GB in use
OS: Win XP Pro. I upgraded to this from 98SE, and have the upgrade CD
XP is currently installed on the C drive.

Anything else you need to know?

Where do I start?

Many thanks in advance,
Robbie

dahamsta

Just lash the CD in, the machine will boot from the CD and you can install as normal. Obviously choose the new drive for where to install to, and choose the fresh install at the NT boot loader when it comes up when you're done. You'll never go near the old drive, and hopefully you'll be able to mount it when Windows comes up on the new drive. If it doesn't, you might need to talk to a recovery crowd (expensive).

adam

robbie1876

Thanks, dahamsta. During the XP install on the new drive, the system will probably want to reboot a few times, right? I presume its going to try to boot off the C drive, will this be a problem? There is a chance the C drive will boot, but I'd rather not take the chance unless I have to.

Btw, as it is just an upgrade disk, I'm not so sure that the machine will boot from the CD. There doesn't appear to be an autorun or anything on it, just a setup icon.

Cheers,

Robbie

dahamsta

Originally posted by robbie1876
Thanks, dahamsta. During the XP install on the new drive, the system will probably want to reboot a few times, right? I presume its going to try to boot off the C drive, will this be a problem? There is a chance the C drive will boot, but I'd rather not take the chance unless I have to.

I'm not entirely sure where it'll boot off so I can't answer that authoritatively tbh.

Btw, as it is just an upgrade disk, I'm not so sure that the machine will boot from the CD. There doesn't appear to be an autorun or anything on it, just a setup icon.

Hmmm, don't think an upgrade'll do it for you. Anyone else know? (XP ain't my bag.)

adam

sceptre

If it won't boot from the CD, get a boot disk from www.bootdisk.com (any windows 98 bootdisk with cd drivers should work but there's also a section for windows XP that includes the small collection of setup floppies), boot from that, load from CD, fanny's yer aunt.

robbie1876

Ok, I haven't got very far with this at all unfortunately. It now turns out that my XP upgrade disk is dodgy, but a bit of research on google tells me that it won't do what I want anyway. The dodgy disk isn't reading at all now.

So does anybody know if the following is possible, and if so how do I go about it:

C: is the boot disk. All the XP and system files are on it. Is it possible to transfer them over to the drive without fecking everything up? Once there, how do I configure the system to boot from the drive, and renaming the two drives? Ideally I want to take everything off the C: drive and physically whip it out of the PC. Every time the computer refers to the C: drive, I'm holding my breath and cringing at the sounds it makes, plus it takes an age to read or write anything to it.

Many, many thanks to anybody who can talk me through this.

Robbie

Red Alert

Yes, i think what you're looking for is a thing called Norton Ghost. This can definitely do these kind of transfers. If you're computer can't start at all it can even run from a boot disk made on another PC.

vibe666

ghost might work, but it'll cost you money (unless you get a ZIP usb hard drive, 80gb+ models as they come with a free trial of ghost, or maybe you can download the same demo from the norton website? not sure tho).

as for XP being an upgrade, as long as you have another windows disk (95, 98 or ME) you just need to insert it at a certain point in the XP installation to verify you qualify for an upgrade.

if it was me and i was installing a new HD for windows I'd format the new drive with a 10gb partition for windows and whatever left use for your data, so if you ever need to reinstall windows again you don't have to worry about losing any data as you can copy it to the other partition.

so get your bootdisk (see the above posted link) and you can use ranish partition manager to create your partitions before installing XP.

before you install the new XP, go to start, all programs, accessories and click on the files and settings transfer wizard (if you can't find it, then go to start, run and type 'migwiz'). run the F&ST Wiz and choose your new data partition (not the 10gb one) as the location for the data. let it run, and when it's finished you are free to install your new copy of windows.

OK, you might want to scratch some of that, as i just looked back and noticed you already have data on the 40gb drive. unless you can get hold of something like partition magic that can create and move partitions around without losing your existing data you might be stuck, unless you know someone with a usb hard drive who you can borrow it off for a while while you move your data around before installing windows again.

OK, assuming you can sort that out with someone (if you're really stuck and in dublin I can help you out) then install XP on your new 10gb partition. once that's done, you can run the F&ST Wiz and import all your backed up data and settings from your old windows installation.

then you should be done.

let me know if you're stuck for a drive to copy data to and I can pop round next weekend and help you out if you like. no charge or anything, just a helping hand for a fellow boardster.

rob1891

it sounds like you really want to avoid rebooting your machine ...

try DrvClonerXP, a freeware ghost style app:

http://www.softpedia.com/public/cat/13/2/13-2-43.shtml

You'll need to have the new partition ready for it, but I think this can also be done without rebooting (perhaps). There is a very good help file but the UI is so simple you probably wont even need it.

However! According to google groups it has been discontinued. There is nothing but praise for it on the groups however it seems to have been pulled because it was not working for some people.

I haven't used it yet, and when I do it won't be a live or die situation like yours, but I think it is worth a try.

robbie1876

Wow! Thanks for the excellent responses, guys. I was shopping around for Ghost until I seen that link that Rob posted for DrvCloneXP, so I got that instead.

Thanks for the fantastic offer of help, vibe. That is really appreciated, and thanks for the excellent advice too. Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, the XP upgrade disk is not reading correctly, so a reinstall of XP is not on the cards anymore. Plus, I don't have the original 98SE disks anymore either.

So far the C: drive is just about still hanging in there, I was able to reboot a couple of times to get to where I am now. This morning I had to reset the bios a couple of times to get the drive noticed, and then it took about an hour to load Windows up, not looking healthy at all.

What I've done is as follows, and I feel a lot better that I have got this far. I've made a new partition on the drive (labelled F:) and used DrvCloneXP to clone the C: drive onto the F: drive. This seems to have been completed without errors, which is great. So the next thing I need to do is make the F: drive bootable.

If I just rename the F: drive to C: and remove the old C: drive, will this work? Or is there some other way I can boot from F? Sorry if this is a very simple question, but I'm relying on you guys for help, I haven't a clue!

Again, many many thanks for the help so far, I think I'm nearly out of trouble now. There'll be beers aplenty flowing your way at the next beers bash!

Robbie

rob1891

You need to set the F: partition of the new drive to active partition for that disk. It may already be so, but you'll have to make sure. Point and click way would be control panel > administrative tools > computer management > storage - disk management and then right click on the F: partition of the new drive and 'mark as active'. If that option is grey'd out it is already active.

Then all that is left is to put the new drive onto the primary connector on the mb. (if it isn't already there) and set it to master (and the old drive to slave, or onto the secondary connector)

Next time you turn on the computer it will look to the active/primary partition on the new drive to boot off, and viola. You should find that drive letters are a little different, i.e. the new F: should now be C: and the old C: will be ... I dunno!

robbie1876

Fantastic, rob, I'll try that right away. Either I'll posting in 5 minutes telling you it worked perfectly, or you'll never hear from Robbie1876 again, in which case you'll know it didn't work....lol

EDIT: Actually, just to double check before I switch off and change the hard drives around, whats happening is this: The F drive has no 'mark as active' option, its not even there greyed out. The D drive (which is the same disk as F drive) has the option to 'mark as active'. The C: drive has 'mark as active' but is greyed out. Is this the way it should be before I swap over the two drives from Primary to Secondary?

Thanks

Darwin

If you're still not sorted, I can maybe offer a little tip to keep your ailing HDD alive a little longer...it may not work but it's worth a try. I had bad sectors on my drive which took the OS an age to load. The drive was mounted horizontally in the bay, so I was told to remove it and sit it vertically inside the case. Although I'm not using it anymore, it now boots up fine with no delays.

robbie1876

Nice one Darwin, I'll probably do that anyway, and use that drive for non-essential data. No point in throwing away 10GB if its still useable. Cheers!

rob1891

hrm, first off, let me say after having a look at the help file that comes with DrvClone it sounds more complicated that I've indicated! Have a look at the help file under 'Cloning an existing C: partition to a new drive'.

You can start from the 'and press Enter' bit of the instructions. The main problem seems to be a subtle registery setting that needs to be changed.

Basically the steps are, set up to new partition to boot, but using the old drives loader, boot the new partition, change the registry, shut down and remove the old drive, reboot with the new one.

I'm not sure what would happen without doing this, once I get my new drive I'll experiment though, I honestly don't think you'd have lost any data

Now, the problem you were having ... you need to make sure that the F: partition you made is not a logical parition, but a primary one. It won't let you boot off logical ones, and if that's what you created you'll have to delete it and start again. Primary partitions have a dark blue bar in the computer management program. Logical have a light blue bar and are stuck in a dark green box. The option of creating a primary partition is the default in the create partition dialog

rob1891

if you want to chat through this pop into #boards.ie on quakenet or pm me an instant messanger handle.

robbie1876

thanks rob. i don't have irc, and i've pm'd you my yahoo handle, which i'm on all day. thanks so much for your help.

TheGrizz(Irl)

Is Robbie1876 still with us....??
I got to know the ending
great thread

robbie1876

*cue big orchestral music and roll the credits*

I'm sorted. Thanks to all who replied. I'm happily now running XP exactly as before, but now my old hard drive is sitting on the desk beside me, until I can think of a suitably violent way to destroy it.

Special thanks to rob1891 who spent many hours with me on yahoo over the last few days sorting me out. I really would have been lost without him and am eternally grateful for his kind help. There will be many beers sliding down the bar at you soon!

Basically, taking rob's advice, here's what we done:

1) Created a new partition on the 40GB drive of 10GB using Partition Magic
2) Cloned the old C: drive to the new partition using DrvClonerXP
3) Altered the boot.ini file so that we could boot off both the C: and the new F: drives. This was for safety in case something went wrong with the new partition (which it did!)
4) Edited the registry on the F: drive, removing all traces of the old C: drive.
5) Switched off PC and removed old drive. Using dip switches, made the new drive the master.
6) Et viola!

Now in reality it was not nearly as simple as this, and a few things went wrong. The most time consuming one was that initially I created a new partition AFTER the partition on the new drive. Then I cloned the C: drive to it. However, because it was beyond sector 1024, it wouldn't boot. So I had to delete the partition (took an age), move the partition to the end of the hard drive (another age) and then clone the C: drive again to the new partition (ages).

We had some quirky things go wrong with the registry too, but rob was on the ball and was clued into what to do.

So there we have it, that's how it ended. Again, thanks to all who offered help, and to rob1891 in particular for the time he gave me.

Another boards.ie success story!

Robbie

TheGrizz(Irl)

delighted for ya robbie