HD advice

Blitzkrieger

So I'm running out of HD space again. Where does it all go? I tell ya - it all goes on patches. I'm keeping Q3 and a ****-load of other games up to date and I never get time to play them

So - the 'puter has two HD slots, primary IDE - 4GB, secondary IDE 10GB. And there's no slot to add a third. I'm just not brave enough to take out the 4GB disk. It's got Windows on it and even though almost everything important is backed-up (where about a Gig of my space went) I don't want to be in the middle of something critical when the whole shebang crashes because of a missing .dll file.

The simplest thing to do would be to copy Windows on to the 10GB drive, boot from that and replace the other one - but you can't copy windows while it's running and if I boot from a floppy it won't read the 10GB disk and I can't copy to it.

I could take a chance and put in a virgin drive, format it and try to install Windows and all the hassle of re-building my software. Plus there's the "If it ain't broke - don't touch it or it might be." rule.

What I want to do is put in a third drive - but there's no slot for it and finding an external one is a nightmare.

Isn't there some way to connect a HD to a PCI slot? There's prolly no room in the case even if it did have a mounting but it could be worth a shot.

---

Excellent command or filename!

SantaHoe

Oh just format the 10-gig and install windows on it you big woman.

Or... you can get "WinLinux" or "BeOS - Personal Edition" that will sit happily as a CVF on your windows partition without much fuss.... Run one of these OS's and copy any protected windows shìte you want.
Then when you're done, just uninstall it, no re-partitioning needed.

Unless your 10-gig needs win9x for you to read it at all?

Cake Fiend

Not sure, but maybe you can copy the Windoze directory in DOS?

SickBoy

Am... well if your motherboard isn't totally ancient then you can run 2 hard drives of each slot. Primary master + slave & secondary master + slave. If you get a 3rd hard drive put it on the same cable as one of your existing drives. You might need a new cable, one with 3 IDE connectors on it. Then just set the jumpers on the hard drive to CS which means cable select and put the drive you want as the master on the end of the cable. If you want you can set one drive to master and the other to slave but I find that CS works best.
You don't have any problems as far as I can see.

Trojan

Do you, like, have a cd-rom? Where'd you install Q3 from, floppies?

Plug out yer cd and there's your 3rd slot, and there's another one on that ide cable as well somewhere like casual jimboy says above here...

Al.

Gavin

hum, i think his problem may be that there just isn't enuff physical space for another hard drive.. tis very annoying

but anyway for copying your windows system.
use a program called ghost to copy the partition exactly onto a new harddrive. You can copy the windows partition to ur 10 gig. out in a new drive, and then use ghost to copy the image back to your new drive. works loike a dream. Makes an exact copy of your partition.

Gav

Canaboid

Of course you can copy Wiindows and the rest of your c: to the 10gb. It's just a matter of knowing how
Win9x - In explorer click c:\ so its contents display in the right hand pane. Highlight the windows folder and select edit - invert selection. This will select everything except the windows folder. Copy em all onto your 10gb d: drive.
Create a windows folder on d: then go back to c: and click the original windows folder so its contents are displayed in the right hand pane. Do the invert select thing again but this time on the win386.swp (page file, I think thats what its called) so copy everything from the c:\windows to d:\windows except the page file.
If you now change d:\ to be primary drive it will boot no probs. You may have to set the partition to be active with fdisk, I can't remember.
This is not for the faint hearted but it works every time.
You can also use xcopy with switches to do this from Dos but I can't remember which ones.

OctaviaN

Xcopy (Drive1):\windows (Drive2): /e /f /h
this will display all files being copied
and subdirectories and hidden system files

But just copy yer patches to the 4gb drive and take it out then set the jumpers on the 10gb to master and reboot format the 10gb and install windows then insert the 4gb into machine (with the jumpers set to slave or cabl select if on same cable as 10gb) and reinstall software.
xcopy may give you problems!!
Plus youll be getting a clean HD and windows install mmmm quicker!
Nick

Blitzkrieger

Thanks Santa - that's what I like to hear

I can't use DOS to copy it cos when it's in DOS mode I can't access the second drive - and as Santa guessed I'm too faint hearted for Canaboid's solution. I think I'll try SickBoy's solution - I should be able to squeeze a third drive into the second CD-ROM slot.

Thanks everybody.

Lump

dont be a pussy... copy all the important files onto the 4 GB...... format the 10 GB slap windows onto it... Copy the **** off the 4 Gb, mank out the 4 GB, and you got a free space... take all of 1 H