Quick question about hard drives

[patman01]

Hello, I have been considering buying a new hard drive for some time now and in light of recent events I fear that my current hard drive may fail soon. My question is, when I get the new hard drive and hook it up, can I move everything (files, settings, windows xp) to the new drive and retire the old one? Does the "files and settings transfer wizard" do this? I have no experience with using that tool so I thought I better ask thanks.

Or if there is another method to transfer everything from the old drive to the new one any info would be appreciated.

[Staz]

Any drive you buy should have a utility to do exactly what you want.

For instance here is how Maxtor does it.

I just did this a couple of months ago with a WD drive and it is really easy.

[patman01]

alas, that is good news for I have purchased this drive http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822144701
thanks!

[Got EpOx]

Originally Posted by Newegg Comment

Don't get this drive if there's a SATA 1.5 Gb/s of the same size for cheaper, SATA II is a marketing ploy. Info from the platter can't be read fast enough to even dream of coming close to 1.5 Gb/s at 7200 RPM.

What do you guys think about what he said?

[MONKEYMAN]

If you read a few reviews it seems that the SATA-2 drives are slightly faster and with a four-disk RAID 0 it makes a significant difference.

[Got EpOx]

You mentioned you had problems with your RAID setup i think a while back. How are they performing now?

[MONKEYMAN]

I had a slight problem which turned out to be a duff SATA cable, Im only using two 40GB drives at present as I moved briefly to a smaller case and didnt have the room for all four without heat issues, I'm hanging on at the moment until I upgrade to a board that has SATA-2 and them i'm either gonna put 4 small Samsung Spinpoint drives in a RAID or get a pair of something with a better seek time depending on the cash available.

[Aedan]

SATA II isn't just a higher speed interface (In fact, you shouldn't refer to SATA 3Gbs as SATA II). There are other additions to the protocol that aid performance and functionality.

Of course, taking advantage of them requires that both ends talk the same version of SATA!

[Staz]

Originally Posted by patman01

alas, that is good news for I have purchased this drive http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822144701
thanks!

Sweet!

That is the exact same drive I updated to. Here is what you do. Go to http://support.wdc.com/download/inde...pid=999&swid=1 and download Data Lifegaurd tools 11.2 for Windows. Then leave you current drive installed (with the data life gaurd tool installed on it) and install your new HDD. Then open up the data life gaurd tools, I don't remember the exact procedure but it is there and it is run from windows. You want to copy the contents from one drive to another. The wizard will walk you through it and make the transfer. When it is finished you shut down, remove the old drive, and set up the BIOS to boot from SATA and power back up.

If everything went as it should then your system will be faster and have more room and be exactly the same otherwise.

[patman01]

Wow, thanks a lot Staz, this will make my transition quick and easy

[patman01]

well everything went quite well in transfering over all the data, but I have encountered a few anomalous problems... When I boot up it always asks me to select the operating system, it lists two "windows xp home" and I just press enter an it works fine, but it's kind of annoying and I wonder how I can go about removing it.
Secondly ever since the transfer I cannot get into msconfig, it simply does not come up. And since I figured that I would need to get into msconfig to fix the listing of the two operating systems I'm stuck. Thanks for any help.

[cloasters]

Boomp.

[Aedan]

From memory, you don't do it from MSconfig, but from Control Panel -> System. Find and click the "Startup and Recovery" settings under the "Advanced" tab. That page should have a "Edit" button on it. When you click it, it will open notepad with the boot.ini file.

Basically, you want to look under the "[operating systems]" section. There's one line per OS listed at startup. You probably want to remove the second one - presuming that you highlight the first one when the system boots.