Upgrading a hard drive

[NBVC]

Ok. I am not much of a hardware person (at least not as much as when I played with my 486 hardware)..

I am looking for advice on upgrading my hard disk.

My Pentium 4, 512Ghz computer needs an upgrade in hard disk space (currently it has 2 GB left out of 20GB capacity). I bought a Seagate 250Gb ATI hard drive and want to replace my old drive with the new one.

The only thing is I don't want to just copy or "ghost" the drives. I want to start new and re-install windows, etc... so I can start clean. I will copy the document files, etc... after.

It should be an easy task, no?

I think I am just lacking a little confidence....so any guidance (or steps) I should take to ensure success would be appreciated.

I am not sure how exactly I get the new drive to be my new C: drive. Will I have to play in the BIOS or does the new technology do it for me?

BTW, I do want to keep the old drive (format it) for backup etc...

...and my OS is Windows XP Home.

 

[Mark O'Brien]

You could make it really easy on yourself and just install the new 250GB hard drive as a secondary/slave drive. That way you won't have to worry about reinstalling Windows and all of your device drivers. Then, if you wanted to free up space on your 20GB drive, simply copy the files over to the 250GB.

 

[NBVC]

Thanks Mark,

I wanted to make the 250GB drive the main/master though and use the 20GB in a USB Hard Drive Sleeve so that I can make it external and portable.

...And I want to clean up all the junk and registry so that programs I don't need anymore won't be reinstalled and therefore won't add junk to the registry.

Any suggestions?

 

[Mark O'Brien]

Nah, that's about all I had.

You might want to have a troll around this forum for some tips:

http://www.pcguide.com/vb/

 

[NBVC]

Thanks Mark.

I will look there (and post) there.

 

[tomrock]

If you take your existing drive out and put the new one in, it will automatically become your C drive when you install Windows on it. Obviously, you'll have to have a CD with Windows to boot off of.

Some older computers won't recognize more than 137 gigs of space on a drive. It depends on the bios. I'm not completely clear on this but maybe someone who actually knows will chime in.

Depending our your version of Windows and of Office, you may have to call Microsoft to activate the new install. I've had to do it before and you just have to tell them you bought a new hard disk. It's very easy.

 

[litrelord]

I’d recommend partitioning the drive rather than having one large space. It really depends what you want to do with it. One 40GB partition would be perfect for windows, then maybe one for media and one for other files. Is there anything to stop you having the 250GB drive as the portable one? A 20GB drive for just windows is no problem at all. That’s what I have in one machine (17GB actually I think). Programs get installed onto that drive, except for games which go on the 160GB drive (but I hardly ever play games so that’s no problem).

When you format the drive you’ll probably want to format it using NTFS for added security and larger file size allowance. The only exception is if you have any desire to try running linux at some point in the future in which case it’s a good idea to keep at least one partition as fat32 as linux won’t write to ntfs, only read it.

Check the website of your motherboard manufacturer for an updated firmware if the drive isn’t recognised or doesn’t seem large enough.

As for the actual install, if you’re replacing the old with the new just swap them over, boot up with your windows cd in and install it. Alternatively, leave the old one in their but put it on the secondary IDE cable and make sure you set the jumper on the old drive to Slave instead of master. It should tell you which jumper to move and what position to put it in. Then install windows as above and your old drive will be available to copy from/to which you get everything organised. Might be worth taking the things you want to keep off the old drive, formatting it and then putting back just the bits you want.

The last option is to put the new drive in as slave to the current drive and go into windows to deal with the formatting and partitioning before you install windows.

Oh, and when you’re installing windows remember to set the PC to boot from CD in the BIOS if it isn’t already set.

HTH

Nick

 

[NBVC]

Thanks everybody for all your valuable suggestions.

Lots to think about...

Much appreciated.