Swapping hard drives in a pc

[Keith 0]

I'm having some issues transferring the data on my new maxtor drive using their software (os refuses to boot up after the process). Just wondering if there are any generic programs that do a good job of this before I just reinstall from scratch?

[Keith 0]

Just wanted to add that I am well aware of all the jumper settings and my bios settings. It's just a typical pc headache really.

[LegoDoom 0]

Does the BIOS recognize it?

Can you not just start up windows and drag the files to the new drive?

[bulletproof_funk 0]

Partition Magic by PowerQuest can clone partitions from one drive to another. If you're moving to a bigger drive, PM can also extend the partition size to match your drive, etc. The only real drawback is each version has a max. drive size limitation (e.g. v8.02 is limited to 160 GB) so be sure to doublecheck that before you delve in.

[LegoDoom 0]

I haven't used Partition Magic in a while, but I remember it being fairly decent.

[Chadd 916]

If you're copying the entire contents of the drive Ghost works well.

[bdj 0]

Partition magic works good, Never use maxtor or western digitals software.

[mickz 107]

Partition magic works good, Never use maxtor or western digitals software.

I have a Western Digital 160GB HD. The software that comes with it is useless. It does absolutely nothing.

[RadioGaGa 162]

Thsi may not have anything to do with your problem, but...are the drives the same format? At work, I had a new Seta (sp?) drive and an old IDE Drive. The Seta was NTFS and the IDE was Fat 32. Transfer/access time sucked. We took the IDE out, but I've since found out that there is a command that will change the system format of the Fat 32 to NTFS. I ran it at home on my old Fat 32 drive (that I use for storage) and it didn't affect any of the files on the drive. I can't remember the command right now, but if you think it will help, I can get it for you.

[bdj 0]

SATA, Serial ATA. I think it's 30% faster than IDE and runs on a diff power and other(dont know name for it) cables.

[Vapor 0]

You have the second one listed as slave?

[Kirsch 1]

If you want to go with a purely hardware solution and you have two computers, you could get some ethernet cable and network the two pcs together. Swap the data and your done.

If not, I've heard good things about Partition Magic, although I beleive it isn't free.

And you would definitely know if you had a SATA drive. The connectors are way different and it requires a different power connector from the power supply.

[bdj 0]

If you want to go the network swap way, go gigabit ethernet. 1000x better.

EDIT: SATA hdd can run off a normal power molex.

[Kirsch 1]

Yeah your right, I forgot about the adapters that they give with the harddrives.