New 20 gig hard drive Advice needed

[devjoy]

I have just purchased a new Maxtor Diamond Max 20 gig hard drive. It has Max-Blast software with it. The installation instructions are a bit confusing. I want to put this hard drive in as a Primary Master but I am wondering if it will be easier to install it as a secondary master to begin with while I install the OS on it. With the large size of it will I need to partition it into multiple 8.4gig drives. The computer I am going to put it in is as follows.

K6 III 400 cpu
Giga-byte GA-5AX (rev 4)
1.27 gig HD
64 mg PC100 ram
OS Windows 95 OSR 2.5

The instructions say to boot the computer using the Max-Blast disk before I install the Hard drive. What is the purpose for this? Thanks for the help.

[Dave_H]

Please read the post in this Forum

For those with EZ-Drive Problems (http://www.sysopt.com/forum/Forum2/HTML/003537.html)

EZ-Drive is the overlay program that Maxtor
disk will put on your drive. I would reccomend not using it unless you have to.

Dosen't that version of windows 95 support large drives?

If you can wait, I'm sure someone who knows more about this will explain it to you.

Dave

[devjoy]

Dear Dave,
The hard drive I am currently using is formated to an FAT32 and is using LBA. I don't believe I have any overlays on the current hard drive. I have installed, fdisked, and formated hard drives before, but never one this large. My BIOS was flashed recently and has a date of 7/16/99 I believe so it is a current BIOS. I just wanted to know if I should start with the new drive in the secondry master and format it there and install the OS there so that I can still use the computer while I am setting up the new drive. Then move the cable to primary master and remove old drive when all the files are tranferred. Also what is the purpose of booting the computer with Max-Blast plus ver 1.11 BEFORE installing the new hard drive? Does it analize the hardware so that it can customize the installation to the computers particular components? Thanks for the response.

[deep_sky]

i just got a new maxtor drive myself and the disk that it came with froze the computer out every time I tried to use it. what I ended up doing is disconnecting the old drive, installing the new one as master on the primary ide channel, and used my boot disk to fdisk the drive to partition and format it. i am kind of unclear as to what set up you had before you got the new drive. If you just want to move the os over to the new drive ( or everything to the new drive), then you can call up a dos prompt( when you have installed the old drive as master and the new drive a slave, hopefully they are both fat32) and do the following:

xcopy c:\*.* /h /i /c /k /e /r /y d:

d: is the drive letter you want to copy to


if that is successful, then shut the system down. take out the old drive completely, and set the new drive to master by itself and see if the computer boots up correctly. if it does, shut it down, hook up the old drive as master and do not hook the new up at all, and get your boot disk and reformat and repartion the old drive. then shut down again, hook the new drive up as master and the old one as slave and it should work. i hope that this is what you are looking for....

i would take this with a grain of salt. i am going to try this when my computer is not school critical. if you are worried about this method, then do not try it.

[deep_sky]

i just got a new maxtor drive myself and the disk that it came with froze the computer out every time I tried to use it. what I ended up doing is disconnecting the old drive, installing the new one as master on the primary ide channel, and used my boot disk to fdisk the drive to partition and format it. i am kind of unclear as to what set up you had before you got the new drive. If you just want to move the os over to the new drive ( or everything to the new drive), then you can call up a dos prompt( when you have installed the old drive as master and the new drive a slave, hopefully they are both fat32) and do the following:

xcopy c:\*.* /h /i /c /k /e /r /y d:

d: is the drive letter you want to copy to


if that is successful, then shut the system down. take out the old drive completely, and set the new drive to master by itself and see if the computer boots up correctly. if it does, shut it down, hook up the old drive as master and do not hook the new up at all, and get your boot disk and reformat and repartion the old drive. then shut down again, hook the new drive up as master and the old one as slave and it should work. i hope that this is what you are looking for....

if you just want to get the os on the the new drive and do not have an old drive, just use your boot disk to fdisk the thing and then do your installations. the max-blast disk seems like a piece of junk to me....

i would take this with a grain of salt. i am going to try this when my computer is not school critical. if you are worried about this method, then do not try it.

[hydraulic]

I just installed a new maxter 17.2 gig harddrive two weeks ago and I used the disk that came with it. it was easy and fast,all I did was follow the promps. It was also set as master. also if you can borrow norton ghost or if you have it use it I just got it and copied my hole hard drive in like 5 minites.It was the easiest way I ever copied a harddrive.

[devjoy]

Thanks everyone for the advice. I went ahead and installed the new drive as secondary master. I followed the instructions using the Max-Blast Plus ver 1.11 and it went flawlessly. It copied the old hard drive to the new one. I am in the process of checking all the programs to be sure there are no problems before I remove the old hard drive and change the cables. I am wondering though, if doing the copy to the new drive made the new drive a bootable drive. I have only done this the old fashion way with fdisk and format, then installing the OS. Has anyone tried booting a disk that was formated, partitioned with the content of the old drive copied on to it using this software without doing a fresh install of the OS on the new drive? I found the installation software to be very good. I haven't seen any thing about EZ-Drive on my system. Thanks again for your help.

[Dave_H]

Devjoy,
I'll try to recall exactly what happened,
but it's been about 7 mos.

Yes the max-blast software "looks over"
how you have the old drive installed and it's size. Then you get a screen asking how you want the the new drive installed.
(master, slave, or if you want to end up with
the new drive by its self when finished)

Then it reccomends how you hook up the new drive and asks you to boot up again with the new drive installed. Here is where it installed the overlay on my new drive.

Either I was not paying attention here, or it didn't give me a choice, I don't remember,
But If I knew what it was going to do, I would have said no.

I stopped at this point and was planning on continuing the next day (it was late).
I thought it over and decited to start over and spend the time to do it right with a clean install of windows 98se and re-load everything.

I removed my old drive, put in the new,
did the f-disk, format, etc. and installed all my software.

After getting everything installed and working, I used my Norton system works to create a rescue disc. When I tested this disk it told me an overlay program was being used and something about not letting the disc doctor "repair" it or it would screw up my system. (thats my translation LOL).

I could have done this wrong and it could have been my mistake, But I'm 99% sure
I did a proper f-disk and format AFTER
using the max-blast software.

Anyway, everytime I boot-up, I see the part about "loading Ez-Drive" and it really bugs me!

Like I said, maybe it was me who made a mistake someware, I'm sure some people have used this with no problem. It just seems silly to me to use an overlay like this when it's not neccessary.

Dave