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I have a 40gb hard drive which is primary. I bought an 80gb seagate barracuda IV to exchange for it (because it was sounding dodgy and the info is way too precious to risk it collapsing on me !) The idea was to use the seagate software to transfer everything to the new drive, then keep the old drive as a backup for files (i.e. not use it very much).

But the seagate software wouldn't work. It kept stopping halfway throught the transfer, and crashing.

So would this work / is it a good idea ?

1) I take out the old drive and put it in a safe place
2) I make the seagate primary and do a fully format / install (probably a good idea anyway as the old drives got a lot of junk on it) including sfp etc etc
3) I re-connect the old drive as secondary, leave everythin on it, but slowly transfer all the data I need onto the new drive.
4) re-format the old drive and re-transfer all the data I want it to be a back-up for.

Will it work ?

Depends on, what you use for formating. FDisk will detroy your data, if you format with it.

Forgive my ignorance . . .

but if the only drive in the machine is unformatted, do I still need to use Fdisk ? Or does it just sort of get me to install win98 straight away and sort out the bios and that sort of thing ?

errr . . . I'm getting scared already !

Sorry - I misread format as partition. your procedure looks fine. Ofcoarse you will partition the new drive, before you install anything. When you then put in the new drive, win98 will probably mess up the drive numbers - untill you take out the old drive again.

I think the second option is a better one for you. Anybody else?

To install Win98 you need a partitionned & formatted drive. So, you have to boot with the bootable diskette and issue those command from command line (fdisk then format).

XP take care of everything for you, including the partitionning & formatting, you just boot up with XP cd, and there you go, follow the white rabbit...

so what's the 'bootable diskette' ?

Can I make one, or was it supposed to come with something ?

Thanks for helping !

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It is in there somewhere (in win98).

http://www.bootdisk.com is another fantastic little resource for such things if you don't have an active install to make disks from.

Saved my bacon many a time.

Sam

in my case,i knew what files i wanted to save,so i saved them to a usb hd.then, after the new install,i just transfered those files to the new hd.i still have the old drive with my old os,so if i need to put it in to retrieve data,i can just change out the new for the old again and boot the old drive and retrieve.

once again if it's 98 then you must boot with a floppy and fdisk.if it's xp then just boot with cd and xp will offer to partition and format.

yeah its win98 so who knows - I might do it this evening !

I've definitely saved a lot to cd's, but no external hard-drive and so too much work to go through by hand making millions of cd's !

As long as there is no chance of me LOSING the data then that's fine (I wouldn't mind if it insisted on loading it to the new drive . . . )

And as long as there isn't going to be too much competition when I put the old drive back in i.e. it won't get TOO confused will it ?

thanks for your words of wisdom

Wil.

no problem,the machine will boot from the c(new drive) you can then transfer from the old drive.

maybe another option is to use something like norton ghost/drive image or the like to transfer content from your old drive to the new one. You need to install the software, make boot disks and then you can transfer existing partitions to the new drive and have an exact copy plus some free space to spare.

HTH
Greetz

So - all done (apart from transfering all the data from my old drive).

Went pretty successfully. The only problems I had were:

1) Taking my old drive out. My new drive (barracuda IV 80gb) is fully shielded in a metal case. The old drive (a western digital Caviar 40gb) wasn't. Unfortunately I didn't realise this until I had put my dirty fingers all over a chip board on its underside. And then spent the next four hours (until I could check it was working) shaking at the possibility of losing everything on it - half off which it dawned on me I had not properly backed up (like all my papers, notes etc for college)

2) I hadn't really thought about how to do the actual installation of the new drive when it was the only one in there ! So it took me quite a long time to figure it out (especially as, of course, I no longer had the internet to help me) Same old problem, and remedy i.e. not being prepared / 'be prepared !'

Thought I'd just update you all on this little manouvre. . .

your name IS mr swim.they say the best way to learn to swim is to jump in the deep end......
congrats!