Help an idiot swithch hard drives

I hate to post this here and waste space, but here is my problem:

I got my new computer, but my hard drive was delayed a few days from the other components, so I used my old 12g hard drive just to get it going. my new 60g hardrive is in, but I can not get it to work.!

I know this is a newbie question, but any help would be greatly appreciated! A friend of mine was supposed to help me, but he bailed out for some reason.

nf7-s, athlon 2500, 2x256 buffalo ram, maxtor 12g disk, and 60g WD hard drive (that came with nothing but the drive and screws OEM). I have tired running it as the master or slave, nothing. With a Win me boot disk, I could access it somewhat, but would not boot.

I am currently running Win Me, and want to upgrade to XP (have the XP disk)

Thanks for any and all help!

use norton ghost you can get a 30 day demo. that shoul do the trick

If you're running ME, and going to XP, forget about your current ME install. Hook up only the 60 gig drive, jumpered as single. Install XP, and patch it. Turn on its firewall, too. It may be crap, but if its there, use it.

Then, change the jumper on it to master, and put the 12 gig on the IDE cable as a slave. Either copy the data to the large one and get rid of it, or copy the data to the large one, format the small one, and move the data back. Whatever you do, in the end, you should not have the Windows ME install anywhere.

Another option would be cloning. As said already, Norton Ghost would work. I myself am going to clone my failing drive as soon as my replacement one gets here later this week. I'm going to use Knoppix 3.3, and have no idea how well it will work. I'll let you know when I get it done.

yeah T_biggs let me know how that goes as im in the process of figuring out the best way to move data, and my demo of Norton is up and i dont really use it that much to justify the price of buying it.

hafaphoto said:

I hate to post this here and waste space, but here is my problem:

I got my new computer, but my hard drive was delayed a few days from the other components, so I used my old 12g hard drive just to get it going. my new 60g hardrive is in, but I can not get it to work.!

I know this is a newbie question, but any help would be greatly appreciated! A friend of mine was supposed to help me, but he bailed out for some reason.

nf7-s, athlon 2500, 2x256 buffalo ram, maxtor 12g disk, and 60g WD hard drive (that came with nothing but the drive and screws OEM). I have tired running it as the master or slave, nothing. With a Win me boot disk, I could access it somewhat, but would not boot.

I am currently running Win Me, and want to upgrade to XP (have the XP disk)

Thanks for any and all help!

Click to expand...

If I were you I would add it in with the current setup before you do anything else... Format it in windows and move some files to it so that you know it's working correctly.

Did you add it in with the old hard drive still connected? Was it recognized by bios? Was it recognized in windows?

Did you have it connected on the end cable connector or the middle cable connector? Did you set the jumper to master or slave corresponding to which connector you had it on?

If you make it clear exactly what you want to do with it, that would help. I don't understand what you were trying to do.

Are you trying to set up bolth drives or just the WD 60g buy its self if your trying to set it up as a single try leaving the jumper out all togeather you can also go to WD web site and get the jumper setups its something to try anyway

Jumper settings should be listed on the drive sticker.

Thanks for the advice!

My problem was getting to windows to format, access the drive.
I used the ME boot disk to get the drive formated, and now have the option of 1) boot from old windows ME (from the 12 gig drive)
or 2) boot from the 60 gig drive into XP. Everything is working great now! Thanks for the input!
E

DayUSeX said:

yeah T_biggs let me know how that goes as im in the process of figuring out the best way to move data, and my demo of Norton is up and i dont really use it that much to justify the price of buying it.

Click to expand...

It didn't go well. What I read on a Knoppix website didn't work, it told me the drives were unaccessible. I probably did it wrong. I ended up installing XP on the new drive, and when making paritions in the computer management console, I screwed up royally and deleted my data partition on my failing drive. I lost 24 hours of ripped (totally legal, no P2P crap) music, hours of recorded TV, and all of my documents... Luckily, I had my most important documents backed up on another computer.

I was hoping for a 5 minute type-a-few-commands-and-wait-a-few-hours with Knoppix, but because of my blunders and impatience with Knoppix, it took me a good 4 hours to finally get all of my software (minus games) installed on the computer again. I'm just glad to be back in Windows, tommorow I can start playing games again.