Hard Drive Change

Status
Not open for further replies.
I have put a new hard drive on my Dell Dimension 8300, initially it was for extra storage, my C drive is 40GB and is now full, i copied my C drive using Norton Ghost onto my E drive 80GB. I need to know how can i tell my system to boot from my E drive.
 
Set the 80GB as the C drive and the old 40GB as the E drive. Are these drives IDE or SATA drives? IDE drives have Master/Slave/ CS (Cable Select) physical jumpers and SATA drives do not have these jumpers
 
Not sur how to rename, is is as easy as right click and rename? My drives are IDE i think, like a ribon connecting. The two drives are on the same ribon.
 
They are probably both set as CS Cable Select. Just swap the 2 drives on the ribbon cable. The drive on the end of the ribbon cable is the C drive. Your old 40GB is in this position now. Put the 80GB on the end...
 
Not sur how to rename, is is as easy as right click and rename? My drives are IDE i think, like a ribon connecting. The two drives are on the same ribon.
Right, but you have to be at "disc management" first. I think most of the Intel chipset based boards run IDE drives as Cable select.

Actually that's a good point since right click will let you rename the drive, but I'm not sure about the file path.
 
Yes, all the OEM computers I work on have limited bios and it seems like they have CS selected IDE drives. I have seen some SATA hard drives comming in recently. There is no need to get into Disk Management with this because renaming can't be done at this point. asr333888 needs to physically place the 80GB in the C position to be able to boot from it
 
Right, and leave the 40GB out altogether until the system is back up and running. This I think because there is an OS on each of the drives. It was imaged by Ghost (!) (?)
 
Totally confused now, what i have done so far is, coppied C to E using Norton Ghost (is this all i need to do? In the PC i swapped the hard drives around (they are on the same ribbon) this did not work, it kept on saying boot failure. Completly removed the old C drive to see if that would work, No it did not. Put it back into the original configiration. Back to where i started from. Please help but in laymans terms from the begining. Thanks
 
I'm really not sure if "Norton Ghost" is the right software to be doing this job. Never used it, so that's pretty understandable.

Both Seagate and WD have freely available software to do what you're trying to do.

I never try to image drives in the first place, and I never own a computer with less than 2 HDDs.

With a new build, I install and update Windows, then put in my software. Everything is installed clean. then whatever data, (photos, movies, whatever), I have to move, I put the drive that it's on in the new computer and simply copy and paste it to the new drive. This is how I deal with "volume" drives, which is basically what you're trying to make out of the 40GB HDD.

So, yes, it does take longer this way, but it always works. The only hitch is with programs that require activation, some software may no be reactivated on the new machine. I have none, only serial number software, so it's easy for me to say this.

If drive images were to be made, it would have been much more advantageous to have them only be of the OS and software, rather than the whole drive, which as I said the data files can be simply copied and pasted afterwords.

There is the possibility that you can go into the BIOS of the computer and set the "E:/" drive to be first in the boot order, and if the image is correctly done, the machine will boot from that drive.

Try and calm down, and tell us if you cant reinstall any of your software, or you need help with the BIOS settings.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back