Hard Drive Annoyance

[MikeDell]

I installed a Seagate Internal 160Gig HD (bestbuy $40.00 after rebate) as my main replacing the original drive from a 98 Dell. Two questions..
I ran the Seagate utility CD disk when installing the HD and every time I boot a PC banner from Oncor (sp) appears stating hit this key to boot from here or this key to boot from floppy. I ignore it, 10 seconds later it boots from the new HD. How do I get rid of it? I tried once, deleted a couple files and had to reload Windows XP again and that's not fun.

2nd question. The orig. HD has some programs on it and I would like to move over to the new drive temporarily making the old the slave. Don't know if it's possible being I purchased them over the net and installed them from their website vs. saving to disk and installing. EX: Virtual Paint.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Chevy

[Sylvander]

"How do I get rid of it?"
Whoa, not so fast, that is the banner that indicates that a "Dynamic Drive Overlay" [DDO] program has been installed [to the HDD] to overcome the fact that your BIOS is incapable of addressing the whole capacity of the HDD.
What capacity of HDD is your BIOS capable of seeing?
With the DDO installed you [in Windows etc] see all of the HDD capacity even though the BIOS cannot.
I used a DDO for years without any problems to speak of, but finally I discovered that I couldn't use "Partition Magic" or "Drive Image" with it in use, so I fitted a PCI [RAID] IDE Controller card.
Took a bit of doing to get it working, but the finished result is worth it because of the much improved speed [both card & HDD are ATA/133][the main advantage I've noticed]. I don't use the RAID facility as yet.
To get rid of the DDO I had to zero-fill and then re-partition the HDD and re-format the partitions.
Killdisk = www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm [free] is the best program I finally found. It displays your HDD drive details really well, will zero-fill the whole HDD or chosen partitions, nice program.
In my case I also had to undo the "Set Drive Size" that I'd completed using the HDD manufacturers utility. Originally I had set the size that the HDD reports to the BIOS to equal what the BIOS is capable of seeing, and had to undo that so the Controller Card could see all of the HDD.

"2nd question"
You can't just copy program files over from one HDD to another; a special program [supplied free] is needed to do that and they charge online for each migration of programs. You also need the settings in the registry, and you cannot easily tranfer those over.
I ALWAYS save my free downloaded programs to a DirectCD written CD-RW disk.
One possible way to do it is to copy ALL the contents of the system partition [Windows + Programs + data], and before you boot, to update [re-run] the Windows installation to match the new hardware.
That installation would then be capable of working with both sets of hardware.
WindowsXP would probably need to be re-activated.
The downside of that is that you'd have registry bloat [two sets of hardware settings in the registry] and redundant drivers.

[Paul Komski]

Seagate should have a utility that allows you to clone the old drive onto the new one. That would get all your programs copied over. When you successfully can access your newly cloned drive (as master) you can wipe the old one and use it as storage. There are third party utilities that can do such cloning but if the Seagate setup a DDO then I woud stay with the Seagate utilities to accomplish this.

Its not quite clear to me whether you now have a clean installation ofWinXP running on the new drive and whether you had Win 98 or Win XP on the original.

[MikeDell]

LOL..Thanks for informing me that overlay is needed to compensate my bios in my 98 Dell. I now realize i should have purchased a new PC vs upgrading. Every addition has been a challenge except the CPU and BIOS upgrade which i tackled 1st being that was my main concern and that worked perfectly improving my PC's performance dramatically. Yes Windows XP is the only operating system ever installed on the new drive. I installed it from the original CD I purchased as part of my upgrade. My new drive reports 149Gig i thought that was normal but I'll check the MOB Bios.

I use to backup to CD's until all the rumors I read about CD's became true. 1/2 the CD's I've burned a few years ago have reading problems. That's why i opted for the external seagate 200Gig HD being i've never had a HD fail on me going back to the 286 machines. The External lasted a couple weeks then died. It was 75% full and I am sick. The music value alone has to be worth atleast 250K.

[Paul Komski]

You could get yourself a pci controller card for about $20 - just ensure its own BIOS supports such a large drive.

Howeer, your other problem is likely to be Win98 which wasnt designed to go over 128/137GB. There are 3rd party utilities/patches to enable 48bit LBA under Win98/ME but how reliable they are is another matter. Othewise dont access any partitions that cross the 48bit threshold with Win9X else data loss can occur.