Computer hard drive swap question/ problem

[Fencer]

I swapped a 60 gig to a 250 gig HD in my desktop. Both are Western Digital Drives and I used the Data life CD that came with the new one.

About 95% seemed to copy and swap over / work ok from what I have tried EXCEPT for my Microsoft XP Office Stuff 2000 version I think maybe 03.

Outlook, Excel, Word. I have tried to reinstal the stuff from the disk using the Repair option but it is not working. I am sure my Word files will be safe if I remove and re-intall it as they are saved in a diff folder. What about my emails I save in outlook? Excell?

I am also getting an error: The wrong Volume is in the drive. Please insert volume drivers into drive D. D is one of my two disc drives E is the other. I didn't do anything with them.

To do the copy and swap I set the new 250 to slave as F with the old master C. Now the 250 Slave F is the Master C.

Obviously, I am up and running and can logon and even cookies/passwords transfered.

Should I just wack it and try to copy again? Also, I am only recognizing 232 Gig from the 250, But IIRC western digital was in a lawsuit for overstating capacity.

 

[SecuLaw]

For really good tech support try here (and it's free): www.techsupportguy.org

 

[Thug]

Save all your files that you want then reformat your new drive and do a fresh install of ALL programs end of story.....

 

[jwilly]

Fence, What happens when you try to open word, excel, etc?

A 250gb hard drive formats to around 233gb in Windows.

JW

 

[Fencer]

Fence, What happens when you try to open word, excel, etc?
A 250gb hard drive formats to around 233gb in Windows.

JW

Error message can't find X file but still opens and runs. Outlook opens from the menu but not the desktop shortcut, but send /recieve says corrupted file use restore disk and then closes.

So 18 GB are lost? can I partition 18 gig and get them back?

At the moment I have swapped the old drive back in

 

[jwilly]

Error message can't find X file but still opens and runs. Outlook opens from the menu but not the desktop shortcut, but send /recieve says corrupted file use restore disk and then closes.

And when you tried to reinstall office what happened?

So 18 GB are lost? can I partition 18 gig and get them back?

No sir.

 

[KSFJR]

I am in the same boat but have not done it yet. I have a program that came with the Norton System works called Ghost. It can be purchased separately. It is supposed to let you transfer all of your files to the new disk and then you just remove the old disk and stick the new one in and should not have to reinstall anything. I was going to hire a computer tech to do it as I do not like to screw with this stuff but he zinged me pretty well for the last job which was a minor job so I am going to give it a try.

From what I have read, it should work. (fingers crossed)

 

[jwilly]

Ghost is the best for this type of thing! That's what fence needs!! Hint Hint!!

Ghost also works very good to back-up your computer to an external hard drive.

JW

 

[wfooshee]

The capacity sold is always optimistic, for several reasons. There is the 1K=1024 problem, which really gets amplified when your talking millions of K.

That's also an unformatted capacity, and formatting puts stuff on the drive that isn't data, but that it needs. Directory space, sector boundaries, crap like that.

Also, Windows reports the capacity in a strict 1GB=1024*1024*1024 formula, so where we see 250,000,000,000 bytes, Windows sees 232.8 Gigabytes. It's not lost space, it's a way of looking at it by powers of two instead of just billions of bytes.

As for Office, the version you have is sensitive to hardware changes. Your process of using the supplied software to clone your original disk was correct, but Office will still "discover" itself on a "different" platform. It would be safe to uninstall it completely and reinstall, except for email and the address book. You'll want to export your address book to a file and copy your current .pst file somewhere safe, and make a note of your email account properties, things like incoming and outgoing servers, your account name and password. If you're like most, Outllok knows your password and you haven't got a clue, so you'll have to contact your email provider for a new one probably. Then after reinstalling Office you'll need to point Outlook to your old .pst files.

OTOH, if you're using Outlook Express for email, instead of Outlook, none of this applies. Outlook Express is not part of Office.

I know that's a "Huh??!?" for most, but that's what's gotta happen.

 

[jwilly]

The capacity sold is always optimistic, for several reasons. There is the 1K=1024 problem, which really gets amplified when your talking millions of K.
That's also an unformatted capacity, and formatting puts stuff on the drive that isn't data, but that it needs. Directory space, sector boundaries, crap like that.

Also, Windows reports the capacity in a strict 1GB=1024*1024*1024 formula, so where we see 250,000,000,000 bytes, Windows sees 232.8 Gigabytes. It's not lost space, it's a way of looking at it by powers of two instead of just billions of bytes.

Hey Man, you never met Fencer have ya? His attention span will never get through all of that! :yahoo: :yahoo:

JW

 

[Fencer]

The capacity sold is always optimistic, for several reasons. There is the 1K=1024 problem, which really gets amplified when your talking millions of K.I know that's a "Huh??!?" for most, but that's what's gotta happen.

I get it

OTOH, if you're using Outlook Express for email, instead of Outlook, none of this applies. Outlook Express is not part of Office.

Not express

Error message can't find X file but still opens and runs. Outlook opens from the menu but not the desktop shortcut, but send /recieve says corrupted file use restore disk and then closes.
And when you tried to reinstall office what happened?

No change, same thing

Ok when KSFJR gets done with Ghost, mail it to me B)

Guess its a good thing I didn't get the 300 G or I loose a lot more than 18

 

[Fencer]

The capacity sold is always optimistic, for several reasons. There is the 1K=1024 problem, which really gets amplified when your talking millions of K.
That's also an unformatted capacity, and formatting puts stuff on the drive that isn't data, but that it needs. Directory space, sector boundaries, crap like that.

Also, Windows reports the capacity in a strict 1GB=1024*1024*1024 formula, so where we see 250,000,000,000 bytes, Windows sees 232.8 Gigabytes. It's not lost space, it's a way of looking at it by powers of two instead of just billions of bytes.

Hey Man, you never met Fencer have ya? His attention span will never get through all of that! :yahoo: :yahoo:

JW

Whadaya mean Those are imaginary numbers!

I'm good with my imagination, ask my wife

 

[DaSpyda]

For greater flexibility, try using GMail in the future. You can POP it to your PC and/or go online - and you have 2GB storage with archival and search features.

Backup/copy essential files off your old HD using a flashdrive, then format new HD, reinstall all programs, then copy over essential files.

Also, Ghost does work wonders and has never failed me.

 

[uctofeej]

Fencer,

I've dealt with similar problems in the past. Windows beat me to a bloody pulp because it just didn't make sense. My end solution was to spend $60 ($25 on a 2GB usb thumb drive and $35 on an empty external hard-drive case). Leave your hard-drive in place as the primary one. Put your shiny, blank, new drive in the external case. Use your USB drive to back up the truly important files (or burn them to DVDs if you have tons of photos, vids, music, etc).

Then, hook up your external drive as a USB port and format through the USB connection (may take a while) in Windows. Doing the slave/primary thing is a hit or miss proposition unless you have exactly the same manufacturer, same number of pins, and identical genetic structure to the a**hole who wrote the "easy" slave instructions, it's more frustration than it is worth. Once your external is set up, then transfer all your files to it (i.e. My Documents or wherever you store your stuff). Then, give Windows a good roto-rootering on the old drive. That'll make it run like zippy new.

Benefits of the external option:

1) No Windows installation on a newer drive it was not designed to run on. (BTW, older Windows versions are limited in the way they can "see" & use space, hence your "loss" of 18 gigs)

2) Larger USB drive is easily transferable to other computers for file storage. Using your old drive as the storage drive will limit your storage space and may be not fully readable in Vista and beyond.

3) Slavery ended in the 19th century, but Microsoft still doesn't know.

Good luck with all the Windows funnery. It's why I switched to Linux.

 

[LDRydr]

I swapped a 60 gig to a 250 gig HD in my desktop. Both are Western Digital Drives and I used the Data life CD that came with the new one.About 95% seemed to copy and swap over / work ok from what I have tried EXCEPT for my Microsoft XP Office Stuff 2000 version I think maybe 03.

Outlook, Excel, Word. I have tried to reinstall the stuff from the disk using the Repair option but it is not working. I am sure my Word files will be safe if I remove and re-install it as they are saved in a diff folder. What about my emails I save in outlook? Excel?

I am also getting an error: The wrong Volume is in the drive. Please insert volume drivers into drive D. D is one of my two disc drives E is the other. I didn't do anything with them.

To do the copy and swap I set the new 250 to slave as F with the old master C. Now the 250 Slave F is the Master C.

Obviously, I am up and running and can logon and even cookies/passwords transfered.

Should I just wack it and try to copy again? Also, I am only recognizing 232 Gig from the 250, But IIRC western digital was in a lawsuit for overstating capacity.

I don't play a computer professional on TV, but I am one in real-life.

Take the other advice about using Ghost to make an "image" copy of your old hard drive and restore it to your new drive. Better yet, get a better product here: https://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

Both of these work with an image copy (as a single file) of the whole hard drive. You need to do an image copy of the drive because while Windows is running you can't use it to copy the files off a drive because Windows has a bunch of files in use and they won't be copied. We won't even get into the fact that file attributes also won't be copied.

Your issue with Office sounds like it's due to your drive letter configuration changing because you've added in a new drive letter. Once you use one of the programs to make and restore your image file to the new drive then either remove your old drive or change the drive letter for it (make it something like F so your CD(s) drives are still the same letters. In any case the Office issue won't be an issue if you do your image copy correctly.

As previously stated, the formatted capacity is not the same as the unformatted capacity. One thing you may want to check is that your old drive is formatted using NTFS, not FAT32. NTFS is a much more efficient file system, resulting in more usable formatted capacity. To see how it's formatted open My Computer, then right-click the C: drive, choose Properties, and look for the File System. It will be one of those two. If it's FAT32 drop me a PM and I'll walk you through changing it to NTFS. Do this BEFORE you make your image copy or else you'll have the same file system on the new drive.

One thing you could do with your old drive is get an external USB case/carrier for it and use it as your external backup drive. Backing up using image files is WAY better than file-by-file backup, since if your drive fails you only have to get a new drive and restore your image file to it. The alternative is to get a new drive, reinstall Windows, reinstall all your software, download/reinstall all the Windows patches and updates, then restore all your precious files from backup, assuming you've been diligent about backing them up.

There are only a few programs that I know of that would need to be re-registered after upgrading a hard-drive in this manner. Most programs (including Windows XP) will allow one or two (sometimes more) hardware components to be swapped out and still have the program work fine. Trying to restore your drive image to a whole different computer would be asking for trouble unless the image program is designed to do so (like Symantec's System Recovery or Acronis Enterprise products), and it would be a license violation.

Hope this helps,

Dennis (whose paying customers support my riding habit)

 

[MotorSWATCop]

And I thought the Feej was complicated when I took it apart.....................................................................................

............Thank God for Nerds.

 

[DaSpyda]

I agree that you should use your new drive as C: - all you need is your older one to crap out on you, while your shiny newer drive is sitting in a desktop case being hardly utilized. Drive life is about five years...

Or, you can do the smart thing and - once you setup your new drive using Ghost - create a RAID array and have an automatic backup of your main HD.

 

[ionbeam]

Your issue with Office sounds like it's due to your drive letter configuration changing because you've added in a new drive letter. Once you use one of the programs to make and restore your image file to the new drive then either remove your old drive or change the drive letter for it (make it something like F so your CD(s) drives are still the same letters. In any case the Office issue won't be an issue if you do your image copy correctly.

Gunny! In Word; top tool bar; click on Tools; then click on Options; then click on File Locations. File locations is where Word looks for its Startup files; documents; tools; core templates such as Normal(.)Dot, etc. You may need to click on Modify and point Word to the new drive letter that contains the core files that Word is looking for. Same is true for Excel and Outlook.

 

[Fencer]

The new drive is "C" after being copied so everything should be looking there

The disc drives D & E are the same - not touched but getting an error message

I will try to ghost it when I get it but for now back to the old drive.