Replacing Hard Drive

[tseavoy]

My old hard drive was making bad noises, so I bought a new one to replace it. I got a Western Digital 80GB drive through Amazon. It came shipped as an OEM unit -- no documentation or instructions. Anyway, I finally got it in the system and formatted using instruction that I had kept from xxcopy documentation that I had kept from the last time I did this sort of thing. I then used xxcopy to clone the new disk to the old drive C. All of this is done in DOS. For some reason xxclone didn't work, I think due to lack of instructions on how to prepare the drive. All is well. The new drive is now drive D until the old drive fails. Then I'll just transfer it to the old drive location and ribbon connector.
The old drive stopped making those bad noises. I think it knew what I was up to.

Tom on Marrowstone


NECTAR, n. A drink served at banquets of the Olympian deities. The secret of its preparation is lost, but the modern Kentuckians believe that they come pretty near to a knowledge of its chief ingredient.

[Rich P]

WD has a good migration tool which will copy over your OS and all your files to the new drive (as long as it is a WD). You then simply switch the jumpers (or whatever) to boot from the new drive. Just in case your old one starts acting up again.

I'm not familiar with "xxcopy" but if it was done in DOS your new drive is probably FAT32 and not NTFS. Might be worth considering the change if you do have to move.

[crokett]

Is the new drive an IDE drive? If so, to be able to boot to it you need to change jumper settings and make it the master while the old drive becomes the slave. Also, if you post the model# of the drive it will be easy enough to check on what kind it is and what jumper settings it needs.