Originally posted by jelly
smurfin i will be getting a radeon 9800 pro june ish but before then ill be getting 2 sticks of 512 ram not keeping the old drive can i copy over everything that i have on there now
If you have your new drive - pop it in you old machine as a second hard drive partition and format it and copy the files over.
Instructions in case you need them:
1) open up the pc and look for the cables connected to your old hard drive and your cd crom.
They may be on seperate cables - if so then IDE 0 is the one connected to your hard drive and IDE 1 is the one connected to your cd rom. If they are both connected to the same cable then they are both on IDE 0.
If they are both on IDE 0, look for a spare IDE cable and plug it into the IDE 1 controller on the mother board ( it will be next to the IDE 0 connector ) - otherwise your will have to unplug your CD rom and attach the connection to your new hard drive.
If the hard drive and cdrom are on different cables - attach your new drive either of the spare connectors on one of the cables.
Plug in the power connector and power up you PC.
If both or either hard drives don't show up turn off the power and look on the Hard drives for the jumpers near the power and ide connectors - if you have both hard drives on the same cable set the new drive to slave and the old one to master ...... if you have the new drive on the cdrom cable set the new drive to master and the cdrom to slave.
Re power you machine and check that the drives appear.
2) Once you have the machine up and the drives visable from bios let the machine run up into windows.
If you are using windows 95, open up a dos window:
type FDISK <return>
if the question comes up asking if you want large disk mode - say yes.
in the menu select the option to change disks ( it will be currrently set to your old drive )
select the option for drive 1 ( assuming it shows drive 0 and 1 ... or 2 if shown 1 and 2 )
you should be presented with the original menu again.
Select option 1 - create a partion
then select 1 - create a primary partition
It will ask you if you want to use all the available space - choose NO and then specify the space you want to use.
Set the value to around 4Gb = 4096Mb = 4194304Kb
Once thats created it should may ask you if you want to make the partition active - select yes.
3) Select option 1 from the main menu again - then option 2, create an extended partition - choose to use all the remaining disk space.
It will then ask you if you want to create a logical partion inside the extended partition - select yes.
When it asks if you want to use the rest of the disk space select NO and specify the size you want - I would say 4Gb again unless you have alot of files to copy over that will be larger than that. This will be where you will cpoy the files to so make it large enough to cover the space you need.
when that logical drive is created, exit fdsik and reboot the machine.
4) When windows has rebooted look at your disk drives - the new drive should show up as D: and E: ( most likely ) unless you have more than one partition on your old drive.
If so it will be D: and the last partition listed.
Select this last partion and it should tell you that it is unformated.
Format it and once done you can then copy all the files you need to it.
5) Power off the computer and remove the new hardrive and install it in your new machine ( checking to see if you need to reset the jumper on the drive to master or no master )
6) you can now install your operating system onto the primary partition of the new drive - it should format during the install process.
Once the operating system has installed and is running - you should see the partition you created from your old computer will all the files you copied over ready for access.
You can then partion the rest of the disk space as logical drives as suits - or once you have copied over the files you need to the operating system drive you can delete the saved files partition and re arrange the space on the drive to match your needs.
***Note: this is assuming you have a single Hard drive / cdrom and are using windows 95 / 98 - let me know if this is not the case and you want extra or different instructions