Moving to a new hard drive
Yesterday I had to change my hard drive and had a few issues
that I was able to fix.
The problems started in the morning when my wife called me and
told me that the computer would not boot. We have been having
trouble with our hard drive for a while now and I was able to
fix each time by just reseting the PC. This time though the
computer was not seeing the hard drive. Using tools and
knowledge that I had I had to do the following:
Install new hard drive
First of all I had to install the new hard drive. I was able to
do this by disconnecting my CDR and leaving myDVD drive, two old
hard drives in the machine, plus a new 80 gig drive with a 16
meg cache. I was unsuccessful at loading Windows though as I
kept getting an error as the Windows setup was starting, after
loading the drivers I would get an error that it could not load
the setup. I switched to my CDR from the DVD drive and had no
problems.
Setup Windows
I successfully did a quick format of the new drive (thanks for
that new feature Windows XP) and successfully loaded Windows XP
although now I have my operating system on the "E" drive. I will
use the Boot Manager utility that is bundled with Patition Magic
to change that back to C later tonight.
Rebuild hard drive partition table
After I booted to Windows I saw that my old drive was not
showing up as a drive or a partition. If I reight clicked on the
partition in disk Management it knew that the drive existed but
could no longer find a partition on it. Windows Disk Management
said that the drive was healthy, My first attempt was to create
a partition but not to format the partition as I did not want to
lose the data for good. I fought with this for a couple of hours
as I did not back up lately and the wife would kill me if I lost
all of her data. In the end I was able to use Test Disk from the
Filesystem tools of the Dos Ultimate Boot Disk. It ends up that
the partition table had a start but not an end and the program
was able to fix this....whew I would have been in trouble....
Migrate Windows and Office data
After I had the old drive back I went into the BIOS and chose to
boot from that drive. I was able to boot to the old Windows XP
installation easily enough and did not want to keep any of the
data there but thought it would be a good idea to transfer my
Windows settings using the file and settings transfer wizard in
Windows. I saved the settings using the wizard and chose this as
the old computer and in the destination I chose a folder I
created on the new hard drive called "transfer files". I then
decided to transfer only my settings as I knew that I was going
to have to reload my software and would be manually copying over
the file structure from the old drive to the new drive.
I also moved all of my settings for MS Office using the Save my
settings wizard from the MS Office 2003 tools section. I was
able to copy the settings, which come across as an OPS file to
the same place as my Windows Transfer Files and Settings.
After I had moved the settings and files over I rebooted and
went back into the BIOS and changed my first boot to the new
hard drive and it's windows XP installation. I was very happy to
see that after running the wizrds for transfering the settings
and after reloading MS Office 2003 I was able to move over my
mail folder and saw all of my email, contacts, and best of all
my email addresses (Still had to fill in the passwords for email
but that's OK). After a relogon I also had all of my desktop
settings back includig the background picture of my daughter and
the animated Pingu cursors.
Copy data from bad drive
Next I just did a blanket move of all of the files from the old
hard drive to new into a new folder that I created in the root
of the drive. I did this simply to save time as I am not sure
about the stability of the old hard drive and fear that I will
lose it again.
Reload software
I have started reloading software but as usual I am going to be
slow about the move this time. I will install some of my
favorite freewares and will install Streets and Trips, Adobe
Acrobat, Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Photoshop Elements and
that's it.
I have roughly followed about half of my Reloading Windows
tutorial but since I have both drives functioning at the moment
I have tried to cut some corners and make this work well as well
as getting my wife up and running quickly for her work stuff
this morning.