Upgrading to new hard drive, need help

[SaveYourself]

I'm moving up from an 8.4 GB 5400RPM Maxtor hard drive to a 40GB 7200RPM IBM hard drive. What should I do before I install the new drive? Do I need to install/uninstall any drivers or software? I know I have to make a backup of everything.

[SaveYourself]

I did a stupid thing...I posted this before I noticed the Hard Drives and Storage section of the forum.

[Rmcky]

SaveYourself, you should backup all of your data, but if your system is running OK now, you can simply transfer your stuff over to the new driive. Most retail drives come with a floppy disk that makes this task easy. If your drive didn't, it can still be done fairly easily, but you will need to know how to Fdisk and Format from DOS. If you do have a floppy disk that came with it, read the instructions and follow them. Basically, you simply re-jumper your old drive to Master, the new drive to Slave, hook up the new drive to the same IDE cable, and the program will do the rest for you. When done, you simply swap the jumpers and your new drive is ready to use and your old drive can be either used as a backup drive or storage or removed entirely if it been problematic. HTH

Rick

[surrealchereal]

I agree, your old hard drive will be a great little storage area!

[Briyun]

Save Yourself-

I did almost the identical hard drive installation about 6 mos. ago and added a 7200 30gb Maxtor to my original 12gb 5400 Maxtor.

If you're interested in copying the info from one drive to another, or just would like to format and install it, Maxtor's home page has got a software d-load similar to a startup disk called MaxBlast Plus v 1.27s It can be found http://maxtor.com/Maxtorhome.htm (HERE

If you're interested in partitioning your drives or need help with formatting them, let me know and I'll give you some resources that'll walk you through step-by-step. (I just did all of this to my system this past weekend, ironically)

The MaxBlast will walk you through the formatting and installation of your hard drive and will ask you if you want to create a mirror image of your existing drive onto the new one.

Post a reply when you've tried it out, and good luck!:D