StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Ok, basic story is that my Dell has experienced a problem that prevents Win XP from loading properly and that the hard drive needs to be replaced soon. It's four years old and needed a new HD and/or formatting anyway, so replacement is the route I've settled on.

I'm familiar enough with replacing RAM chips and video cards, but not any hardware more integral than that. In fact I was going to pick up a 200Gb Seagate before Christmas but the differences in cables threw me off (I only saw ones including either SATA or some other type of six-wire cable, but looking inside my machine reveals it uses two types which looks suspiciously like both, much to my confoundment). I'd like to be sure I'm not ignorantly picking up one that is missing stuff or isn't compatable before I plop down money.

Anyway, I was mainly interested in suggestions here as to the best method for installing a new HD and transferring my important files from the old one. The most straight-forward method I could devise off the top of my head was to swap out the old drive for the new one, perform a clean install of my OS and major programs, and then reintroduce my old HD as a secondary drive to upload my personal files and minor programs. I considered adding the new drive and then moving files/installing programs, but I don't think my machine is stable enough for that (I had enough of a time getting to safe mode and moving files onto a disk).

I do have a second 750Mhz Win98 machine to use in the process, and can get a hold of an external harddrive as well if best to do so. I'd appreciate advice and give thanks in advance.

What's the model number of your Dell?
Their website lists the specs for each of their models that should tell you if you need an IDE (flat ribbon cable) or a SATA (thin narrow cable) drive.

If it's four years old, any cheap IDE (also known as Ultra ATA) hard drive should work fine.
As for transferring your files, I'd remove the old drive, do a clean install of XP and all of your programs, and then add the old drive in as a secondary, pull your data off of it and then trash it.
I wouldn't pull any installed apps off because even small ones frequently need to make registry changes, so it's safer to just use the install routine.

Something else to consider is the purchase of Acronis True Image Home 10 ($31 downloadable from Newegg), use it to make a hidden partition on your new drive and keep a backup image of your OS and app install.

What I did was use it to image (on the third HD in the system) my bare OS install after putting in all of the hardware drivers and running Winupdate.
Once I did that, I then installed the apps I currently use and imaged that installation as well.

That way, if the OS gets hosed I can be up and running in under 15 minutes (HD to HD recovery time for a 10 gig OS/programs install is about 8 minutes).
Also if I ever decide to make major changes/upgrades in my software, I don't have to worry about uninstalling/reinstalling programs. All I have to do is use Acronis to reinstall the image file of the bare OS, run winupdate to bring it back up to speed, then proceed from there.

It's the best $31 I ever spent on utility software.

Well, after several days of troubleshooting, installations, and mishaps, I finally got a new 300Gb hard drive and a running WinXP installation. I'd like to thank Glocksman for the advice, allowing me to order a drive as soon as I was mailed a $30 discount from Office Max.

The first hard drive Office Max shipped to me was used, missing cables and all accessories asides from a crumpled manual with highlighted paragraphs and two inspection papers signed by Office Max: one the day it shipped and the other dated five weeks earlier.

So suffice to say that got sorted out and I the next issue was learning about the wonderful world of 48-bit ATA processing. Several format and XP Pro SP1 install attempts (which I began timing myself at, got down to 30 minutes) failed during this; the drive would fail to load after resetting or shutting down due to what I soon learned was that despite having the right OS and hardware at the get-go, my drivers needed to be updated to PCI 166 to handle the full size of the drive. The manual brought the issue up, but didn't exactly mention what the failed results would be to identify until I went ahead and partitioned the drive in half.

So at the moment I'm working with a 127Gb boot partition and a ~160Gb data partition, with my old 120Gb drive still readable for the most part and hooked up as a slave. I've copied my documents, installed some important drivers, and played some games on it, but haven't really done much. I wanted to format it as a single partition, but to the best of my knowledge I think this setup will work.


Can I run games off a data partition? I tried Diablo II once by installing it there but it just went black and froze on me, which would be disappointing as I considered using the 2nd partition for old/rarely-played games. Should I consider it a viable option to reformat the drive, partition it as one 300Gb space, and then install XP and immediately update the IDE controller to 48-bit, or is that just foolishness doomed to more drive index failures?