Need some help with hard drive 'swapping'.

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Thalin

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Hey there,

My sister and I have agreed to swap hard drives, because she has a 144gb one and uses about 40gb, and i have an 80gb one and only have a few gb's remaining! Trouble is, i'm not a hard drive buff, and need help. This is how I was planning to carry this out, but I don't know if it will work.

1) Move all my docs onto my sisters PC via network - DONE
2) Reformat my hard drive and reinstall Windows
3) Move all my stuff and sisters stuff onto my hard drive from her PC via network
4) Reformat my sisters hard drive and reinstall Windows
5) Swap hard drives
6) Get all my stuff back from my sisters computer (who now has my old hard drive)

I thought this would work, but then my friend said something about not being able to swap hard drives because of problems with drivers, and me needing to do a load of things in safe mode etc.

Can anyone here help me with this?
 
Why don`t you just swap computers with your sister ? You can also buy 40GB drives for under 50$.
 
We are both using legal copies of XP on each machine. We therefore have 2 activation keys as we should.

I don't want to waste money on a hard drive that I could probably get from my sister.
 
Suggestion 2 -

1) Move all my docs onto my sisters PC via network - DONE
2) Put my drive into my sisters PC as Master,with hers as Slave. Reformat my hard drive and reinstall Windows,with her XP.
3) Copy all my stuff and sisters stuff onto my hard drive from her drive.Back up to CD/DVD, external USB drive anything that won`t fit on my drive.
4)Put my sisters drive into my computer.Reformat my sisters hard drive and reinstall Windows,with my XP.
5) Get my sisters stuff back from her computer over the network.
 
So I take it my oringinal idea won't work?

I've always got stuck with setting slaves and masters, could you help me with this?
 
Thalin said:
So I take it my oringinal idea won't work?
Click to expand...
As far as I can see,the way I`ve described,is the only way it can be done.Unless I misunderstood your "step 2" about reinstalling on your own PC.

The jumper issue is fairly straightforward,AS HERE
 
you got 10 gb or so of swap space left
if your doing a new format install
you can at least try this make a new partition on large drive put all your stuff on it
get seagate disk wizard utility
delete and reformat the 40g your drive
run her machine with the seagate and say copy c to what ever ? d 40gig
as new disk should prompt you as to a boot system disk and so on
it will setup the drive just right your stuff is safe on the new partition
and shut down remove the large drive and repalce with the 40 in her machine windows should not do much in the way of HAL or activation problems
now with the large drive that has your stuff
you can try and fix the boot ini to boot with 2 OS's and choice yours then run seagate again to copy to the front end or just reformat the front end and reinstall
other than the 2nd operation, I have swapped drives like this, a lot
 
OK I now have a new problem. The file problem is sorted.

I took the hard drive out of my sisters PC and found it was a SATA one, with no ribbon. I've never used one of these before, but thought i'd give it a shot. I connected the 4-pin power adapter as usual, and then the SATA wire from the SATA slot 1 thing on my mobo, to the other end on the hard drive.
I then turned on the PC, and in the BIOS, it can't pick up the hard drive. When I try and install Windows it tells me it also can't pick up a hard drive, although if I carry on with the boot as usual, it acts as if it's using my sisters PC, showing me a Norton GOBack boot screen etc.

I have an ASUS A7N8X motherboard, and the hard drive is a Western Digital WD1600. I tried putting the SATA Raid drivers for my motherboard onto a floppy, and pressed F6 as the Windows setup was loading. It said it had picked up the hard drive now thanks to the drivers, and so I pressed enter to continue, but then it just says it can't pick up the hard drive again when it is about to format and also in the BIOS.

I'm stumped. Can anyone help me?
 
I tried putting the SATA RAID drivers
Click to expand...
This was somebody`s solution to a very similar problem(was it you ?)

"I finally figured out what I was doing wrong. I found out that the mobo supports two kinds of SATA support. I had the SATA lead plugged in to the SATA1 port on my mobo,which is located directly adjacent to the VIA chip, but I was trying to install the drivers for the 'PROMISE SATA378 CONTROLLER' which are the drivers for the RAID SATA ports that are located lower on the board, and are labelled RAID1 & RAID2. It seems obvious now, but what was most annoying was that there was never any clear mention of this in the mobo manual
Once I had updated my BIOS and then installed the drivers for the VIA SATA controller, which incidentally can be found on the support CD,the setup identified my HDD and everything went glitch free from then on."

From HERE
 
I don't know anything about two types of SATAs on my mobo, and I can't see any more sockets on my motherboard. I really need help with this, please can someone help!
 
SATA can be setup to work just like IDE drives (with no RAID support), or it can be set up as RAID. there is a third one, which is kind of a mixer...

RAID is a format so that multiple harddrives can be written/accessed simulatenously with the same data to speed loading times.

http://wiki.extremeoverclocking.com/wiki/RAID

that should explain what it is and how to do it.
 
I still havn't managed to do this.

Currently :

-The motherboard is set to RAID enabled (via jumper)
-The SATA cable is connected to the hard drive and SATA slot 1 on the mobo
-The jumper on the HD has been set to cable select and single installation, neither work
-The hard drive is not picked up in the BIOS
-When I press F6 to enter RAID utility at boot up, it picks up the drive. But I don't know where to go from there. I don't understand RAID, and as far as I know, all the tutorials I have read say disable it, or it's only needed when using 2 drives. I am only using one
-When Windows is loading the files at startup, and asks you to install a driver, I do so via floppy, it says it's picked up the hard drive (or just the driver...) and then when I press enter it just tells me there is no hard drive connected (again)

So, any ideas?
 
disable raid
all you need is the drivers they are in some cases written as one
so the chipset driver and raid controller are the same software
some are not labled raid ,but scsi
for most part I have not jumpered my sata at all and from what I gather it is automatic
look to manual on the right config for MB to setup your sata boot option channels
make sure you don't have the ide in when trying to install OS to sata
this can make things worse
 
Well that's the thing. Despite having an up to date BIOS, there is no option in there to disable RAID or anything to do with SATA. I'm still stuck :(
 
HOORAY!

We have progress. It carried on with the setup, and got to the format screen. I'll continue later and hopefully it will be installed!

It had something to do with the SATA drivers on the floppy being out of date.

HOORAY!
 
OK, we have more problems. Whoopdeedoo.

I've managed to install the new hard drive on mine, and it did seem on my sister's machine too. I connected up the hard drive and DVD drive on the same ribbon, because there was no other way of doing it, and in my BIOS it told me the master was the DVD and slave was the HD. So, I went ahead and installed Windows. It installed fine, and then I installed SP2, restarted and DISK BOOT FAILURE - INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER - strange how it was working fine before. So, I swapped some cables around, fiddled with the jumpers, then it told me on boot up it was missing a .dll file in the Windows folder. So, I swapped things around again, and DISK BOOT FAILURE - INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER. This is all it says now, and what's worse, I can't even reinstall Windows now, I boot from the XP disk, it says inspecting system configuration, then sits on the black screen and does nothing.

I've had it with this. Can anyone offer any advice, because this is really p*ssing me off.
 
It just seems to be this cycle. One minute it says in BIOS the DVD drive and HD are picked up, I restart, it tells me only one can. I restart, the other one can, I change the jumper, restart, both can, etc. It just goes on, even if I restart and change nothing it'll show something different in the BIOS.

I really have no idea what to do from now.
 
when you tried to install the 2nd time did you delete the first instance
on bad installs this should be done
don't try to install on top
best thing get a boot utility to wipe that partition(reformat)
some will only wipe whole drive paragon and acronis will wipe just that partition
 
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