View Full Version : Hard Drive upgrade advice needed
RobsterD
01-08-2003, 2:08 PM
Hi,
I'm in the process of upgrading my 40g drive to the Seagate 160g sata drive,can someone advise on the best procedure.
My present drive is formatted in NTFS and I'm not using any partitions,was going to ghost straight to a the full 160g without any partitions,but after reading some posts this doesn't seem to be the best route.
Would setting a 40 g partition and then ghosting to that be the best route or would a full install be recommended separating the op system from my applications.
Thanks for any advice
Rob
Bursar
01-08-2003, 2:40 PM
You'll need to do a full re-install I'm afraid.
The SATA controllers will appear differently to Windows compared to the ATA controllers. You will get a blue screen if you simply ghost the Windows setup onto the new drive and try and boot up.
By all means create a seperate partition on the SATA drive, and Ghost your old image onto it so you can pick your data off.
But you will have to do a fresh install of Windows onto the bootable partition of the SATA drive.
you could always just keep the OS and programs on the 40g drive abd install the sata drive as a seperate drive .
This is what I''ll do at some point in the future on my desktop: ata133 drive is the boot and programs disc, raided serail ata is for material for editing.
I tried to ghost an NTFS disk and failed miserably, so I'd go along with the advice of using the SATA drive as a secondary drive. You could always move some of your easily portable stuff over to the new drive to free up a bit more space on the main drive.
RobsterD
01-08-2003, 5:00 PM
Thanks for your replies,the 40g drive I'm using is out of a Sky + box hence is only 5400,this is my dilemma will I notice much difference in speed with the sata drive ie running programs etc of the sata and using the 5400 drive for the os,or shall I just forget the sata drive and ghost to a standard 7200 drive.
Ideal solution would be a reload onto the sata,but what are peoples experiences with these drives over standard ata.
Cheers
Rob
You can get away with ghosting to the new drive but you will need to do a repair on the NT bootloader afterwards, not a job for the faint hearted!
You will notice an improvement in boot up times by using the faster drive but probably not for much else.
james.miller
01-08-2003, 7:14 PM
Originally posted by Mr.D
you could always just keep the OS and programs on the 40g drive abd install the sata drive as a seperate drive .
This is what I''ll do at some point in the future on my desktop: ata133 drive is the boot and programs disc, raided serail ata is for material for editing.
that is totally the wrong way of going about it. a sata raid array will far outperform a single ata drive - the operating system should be on the raid array.
JohnG
01-08-2003, 10:03 PM
James - where does this raid array suddenly appear from ?
james.miller
01-08-2003, 10:05 PM
Originally posted by Mr.D
you could always just keep the OS and programs on the 40g drive abd install the sata drive as a seperate drive .
This is what I''ll do at some point in the future on my desktop: ata133 drive is the boot and programs disc, raided serail ata is for material for editing.
JohnG
01-08-2003, 10:10 PM
Ah I see - sorry I misunderstood I thought you was refering to Robs' post