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I'm looking for some advice on improving my hard drive setup

Discussion in 'Computers' started by Mike_Mig, Oct 23, 2004.

  1. Message #1 of 9 Oct 23, 2004
    Mike_Mig

    Mike_Mig Stunt Coordinator

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    To start with this computer is close to 4 years old but suits my needs perfectly, put it together myself. So it's not the newest thing. A year or so ago I wanted to add a hard drive to my computer that was running windows XP pro. My original 20 gig HD had been converted from fat32 to NTFS when I went to XP. I added a 120 gig HD for storage purposes, but when trying to use windows to format the 120 gig it would fail at what appeared to be the end of the process. I had gone from windows ME to 98 and probably back and forth some, so I just decided to do a reinstall of XP figuring something was corrupted. It ended up not working as the XP install would fail, the reasons don't matter now. At this point I couldn't even boot to windows so I figured I had to use the 120 gig to load windows to then I would be able to get my files off the 20 gig after I was up and running again. For reasons I couldn't solve at the time I couldn't boot from the XP cd I had so I was going to have to boot from a floppy. All I could get my hands on was my 98 boot floppy. I thought about loading 98 on the 20 gig but as I converted it to NTFS that was a no go, that's why I had to go to the 120 to load windows to. So I ended up loading 98 onto the 120 gig as Fat32 and then loading XP over that, I didn't convert to NTFS because if I had a problem in the future and had to do this again, the 98 boot disk wouldn't be able to recognize the NTFS file system and I'd be kind of screwed. I was now up and running and copied everything I needed off the 20 gig to the 120 gig. This is where I am at now. A 20 gig that has nothing useful on it that I would like to load XP on to use it for only the OS, and the 120 currently with the OS and all other files on it in Fat32 file system. I want the 20 for windows only in NTFS and storage on the 120. That way I could reformat the 20 or whatever I want to do to it without losing my files on the 120. Is there a good way to go about doing this without having to start from scratch, I'm pretty happy with how I'm running, but I never reached my initial purpose. If I reformat the 20 and load XP on it, how would it boot? Would it give me the option of choosing which drive to boot XP from? I use it on my RPTV with custom resolutions that I don't feel like having to mess with as I am happy with how they are now, so I would really like to just take the OS from the 120 and move it to the 20 if that's even possible. Any advice or other recommendations would be much appreciated, then I can work on backing up what I have. Thanks for reading this whole thing.

    Mike
     
  2. Message #2 of 9 Oct 23, 2004
    Glenn Overholt

    Glenn Overholt Producer

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    Yep. That was a long one.

    Ok, your 2 IDE drives will boot with the master drive first. Without re-reading your post, I think you put the 120gig in as a master, and it screwed everything up. You should have switched that little jumper in the back first, I think.

    Anyway, you do have a good idea. Keep ME on the 120 gig as a backup, and if/when XP takes a dive, you just switch the jumpers around, reboot into ME, and reload XP up on the 20 gig, and switch the jumpers back.

    In addition to that, the 'My documents, pictures, music' and other saves I have changed the properties on, and put them on the drive where ME is.

    I hope everything came out right. Good luck.

    Glenn
     
  3. Message #3 of 9 Oct 24, 2004
    Mike Fassler

    Mike Fassler Supporting Actor

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    make sure you have the 120 setup as a slave and the 20 as master. you could make a dual partition and load xp and me on the 20 gig and when you boot the pc it will ask you to choose which OS you wanna boot into, althou I wouldnt bother with me anymore. theres a possibility that the 20 is failing as well and that could be the cause of your problems. make a Norton Ghost image of your drives and you will be up and running after a format in a matter of minutes not hours.
     
  4. Message #4 of 9 Oct 24, 2004
    Joseph DeMartino

    Joseph DeMartino Lead Actor

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    For pity's sake, don't load ME on anything. That CF of an operating system ought never have been released. Use 98 SE, if you must, but never ME.

    Yes, when you install multiple hard drives one of them must be set as the master and the other as the slave. The master will be usually be the bootable disc. It seems you may have missed this step and thus produced some of the problems. I also suspect your CD-ROM drive is not set as a bootable device in your system BIOS, or else it is so far down the list that the system never gets to it and tries to boot off a hard drive or floppy first. I would do two things: Check the jumper settings on the two drives, then the BIOS settings for boot devices. I always make the CD the primary and the first HDD the next in line. (If I'm so screwed up I'm actually reduced to using a floppy I make the change manually.)

    You should then be able to boot from the CD. If this works there is no particular reason to keep any earlier version of Windows than XP, but if you insist on doing so you can reinstall it on the 20 and make it bootable, while keeping the 120 for data storage. For efficiancy's sake you might want to partition the 120 and create at least one NTFS volume on it to store files.

    Regards,

    Joe
     
  5. Message #5 of 9 Oct 24, 2004
    Glenn Overholt

    Glenn Overholt Producer

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    Good grief, you sound like ME is one huge virus! I am sure that you misunderstood what I wrote. You load ME up on the 120, and after you are sure it works, you put XP on the 20. From then on, you don't touch ME, but it is there if something should go wrong with XP. You can take what files you need to off of the 20g, and reformat it and load up a fresh copy, and then go back to using XP.

    This is much easier than changing your bios to let the CD drive load first, especially since not all drives will support booting. You won't need to find a floppy disk either, you just go into ME and do whatever needs to be done.

    Glenn
     
  6. Message #6 of 9 Oct 24, 2004
    Joseph DeMartino

    Joseph DeMartino Lead Actor

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    You mean it isn't? [​IMG]

    Look, I did telephone support for a Major PC Manufacturer for awhile and there has simply never been a Windows version (with the possible exception of 1.0 and 3.0) that has been the source of as many headaches as Millenium Edition. Windows 98 SE is genuinely more stable under most circumstances and has fewer untested, half-baked "enhancements". I have an uncle who has ME on his computer and I get three times as many e-mails and phone calls asking for PC help from him as I do from the rest of the family (Win 98SE, 2000 or XP) combined. For most people who have PCs that shipped with ME and are interested in upgrading my advice is buy a new box, use the built-in data and settings transfer utility in XP and get rid of the old one. [​IMG]

    Regards,

    Joe
     
  7. Message #7 of 9 Oct 25, 2004
    Kimmo Jaskari

    Kimmo Jaskari Screenwriter

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    The 120GB drive is no doubt massively faster than the 20GB. Far larger hassle if it requires reformatting but you'd probably gain overall performance by using the 120 as your master drive instead of the old 20. Faster OS access, faster swapfile, etc.
     
  8. Message #8 of 9 Oct 25, 2004
    Mike_Mig

    Mike_Mig Stunt Coordinator

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    Wow, the only reason I even mentioned ME was to demonstrate that it sucked and I had to load 98 to have a computer that worked, but may have gone back and forth a time or two which made me think it would be a good idea to do a reinstall of XP when I ran into problems formatting the new hard drive. When I built the computer ME had just come out, so I figured it would be the best to use. Man was that a mistake. I did make sure the jumpers were right (20 master, 120 slave) when adding the new drive, that doesn't mean I didn't make a mistake. At first it booted fine on the original 20 as master and I just needed to format the 120 to use it. The format never worked. In the bios settings I did have the CD as a bootable device, but not sure anymore if it was before the hard drive. All I really want to do now is get XP on the 20 and storage for MP3's and pictures and such on the 120 without having to reload all my software and everything that goes along with starting from scratch. Maybe it isn't really as easy as I hoped it might be. Thanks for the help guys. Oh and the two drives are both 7200 rpm western digital drives so I'm not sure about the post relating to the 120 being faster, but I'm certainly not a hard drive expert so it could be I guess.
     
  9. Message #9 of 9 Oct 28, 2004
    Kelvin Tucker

    Kelvin Tucker Stunt Coordinator

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    Mike - a couple of suggestions.

    1) I'm no writer, but it would help readers a bit if you would make smaller paragraphs. Maybe 3-4 sentences.

    2) Remove the 120Gb, using the 20Gb as master and boot from WinXP Setup Boot Disks

    3) Install XP to the 20Gb

    4) Add the 120Gb (as slave) and do what you will.

    Personally, I would get the CD boot working if at all possible. Also, make sure that your BIOS is updated since the format failure that started all of this is troubling.

    K
     
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