Hard drive upgrading problem/roadblock

[joea64]

I've run into a temporary (I hope) showstopper upgrading my hard-drive storage capacity. At the present time, I have the primary IDE HDD's:

Master (primary IDE channel): 20 GB Maxtor
Slave (primary IDE channel): 13 GB Seagate

The primary IDE channel is a UDMA channel, as indicated by the blue connectors on the motherboard and the drive cable. The secondary IDE channel has a DVD drive as the master and a CD-RW drive as the slave.

I am trying to replace the secondary (slave) IDE drive, the Seagate, with a 40 GB Western Digital drive (model WD400). The problem is that when I attempt to move files from the current secondary drive to the new secondary drive, the xcopy command doesn't seem to want to work.

I have my drives partitioned this way:

C: - single large partition on the primary drive
D:
E:
F:
G:
H:
I: - logical drives/partitions on the secondary drive

The system assigns letter J: to the DVD and K: to the CD-RW.

Now, I've tried several ways to transfer data from the current secondary drive to the new drive, using XCOPY:

1) With the new drive as temporary slave drive on the secondary IDE channel (the CD-RW disconnected)
2) With the new drive as temporary master drive on the secondary IDE channel (both CD drives disconnected)
3) With the current secondary drive as temporary master and the new secondary as temporary slave on the primary IDE channel (taking advantage of the UDMA connector)

The problem is that, whenever I do a floppy boot with the system disk I created at my most recent Windows installation, and attempt to run XCOPY, I get a system error message reading: "CDR101 Error reading drive Q (or drive P) - Abort, retry, fail?", which I _think_ refers to the missing CD-ROM drive that is temporarily disconnected. This is when the computer is started with CD-ROM support.

When I start the computer _without_ CD-ROM support, I get a "Bad command or file name" error message when I try to run XCOPY.

Also, when I have the drive connected to the secondary IDE channel (which isn't UDMA, just regular enhanced IDE), I get a message about not having the proper 80 connector cable installed. (I expected that, actually, since as I told you, I already know that I need to have both HDD's connected to the UDMA connector when the process is done.) This is somewhat of a side issue, because I _was_ able to complete successful FDISK and FORMAT on the new secondary HD to create, or rather re-create, the partitions in the new sizes I desired.

_Regular_ COPY works, however, but this is of limited utility because I don't know how to copy directory trees/structures from one drive to another under the DOS prompt. (I might try that if worst comes to worst, though, because regular COPY does, as I said, work, and if I can figure out how to copy directory trees/structures. I have no programs currently installed on any of the partitions on the secondary HDD, just pictures, HTML files for my website, and archived files, so it's possible I might not _need_ XCOPY after all if I can figure out how to move/copy directories in their entirety under the DOS prompt.)

When all is said and done, I'm fairly sure that I'm missing something that I should be doing - but what?

Oh yes - I'm using Windows 98 SE, and the boot disk is the Win98SE boot disk.

-Joe-



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Alternate email: joea64@yahoo.com

[joea64]

Something else I just thought of....

I think I've figured out what the "error reading drive (foo)" message meant. When you boot from a system floppy in Win9x, the floppy sets up a virtual drive using the first available drive letter after the hard drive letters in use. For instance, when all my system drives and partitions are up and working (c: through i: for hard drives), when I boot from floppy, the "virtual drive" is created on drive j:, moving the CD-ROM drives one letter up to k: and l:.

Since I had FDISK'ed and formatted the new drive to the partitions I am intending to use for the secondary drive, the system floppy was seeing these hard drive letters:

c: - primary
d:, e:, f:, g:, h:, i: - current secondary
j:, k:, l:, m:, n:, o: - new secondary (which was slaved on the secondary IDE channel the first time around)

That made the virtual drive p:\. Therefore, the "cdr101 error reading drive...", in this instance, read "cdr101 error reading drive Q", which actually referred to the _CD-ROM_ drive which was still connected to the system.

In other words, ***XCOPY was looking for a file on the CD-ROM drive even though I had specifically instructed it to copy files from drive D: to drive J:***!!!

What the hey?!

-Joe-

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Alternate email: joea64@yahoo.com

[gwallen4]

The software floppy supplied with your WD drive will have a program to partition and format your new drive and copy the data from any other partition to your new drive.

If you didn't get the disk from WD, you can download it from their site.

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Sandman

[joea64]

*snaps fingers* I should have thought about that. I bought the drive as a "bare" unit today, so it didn't come with any installation software. I'll go over to the WD site and look into getting that program. The problem, as I see it, is that the software might not have a provision for creating the new partitions first at the sizes I want _before_ copying the data over.

Another alternative I thought of is this: copying all the data currently on the secondary drive to the primary drive (which has enough space for it), then removing the old secondary, installing the new secondary, and moving the data back onto the new secondary.

-Joe-

Originally posted by gwallen4:
The software floppy supplied with your WD drive will have a program to partition and format your new drive and copy the data from any other partition to your new drive.

If you didn't get the disk from WD, you can download it from their site.





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Alternate email: joea64@yahoo.com

[nev]

Hi there
I couldn't be bothered to read all you wrote, but If you are trying to move the contents of one drive to another you cant just copy it,you need a program like drive image to clone it.
Nev

[gwallen4]

The WD software is called Data Lifeguard Software and it can partition the drive to any size.

After the drive is partitioned and formatted. Use the advanced options in the software to copy the data. It will create an exact copy.

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Sandman

[joea64]

Well, that's what XCOPY is _supposed_ to be for. I used it successfully in Win95B last year on my secondary machine, to clone the contents of the old secondary drive to a new secondary drive. The thing here is that XCOPY is failing on Win98SE for a peculiar reason, if I am interpreting the error message correctly; it was trying, and failing, to find files on the CD-ROM drive when it had _not_ been instructed to attempt to access that drive.

I will note for the record that when I put in a Maxtor 20GB as the primary drive on this machine last December, I did use the MaxBlast software to partition and format it and clone the contents of the old drive to the new one. Not only was it successful, but it was extraordinarily fast considering.

I am thinking of temporarily removing the primary drive, making the old secondary drive the temporary master, slaving the WD and then running the Data Lifeguard software. Because I will be doing it on the UDMA channel, that may speed up the data transfer considerably.

-Joe-


Originally posted by nev:
Hi there
I couldn't be bothered to read all you wrote, but If you are trying to move the contents of one drive to another you cant just copy it,you need a program like drive image to clone it.
Nev





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Alternate email: joea64@yahoo.com

[joea64]

The Western Digital 40GB is now installed on my system as the secondary, and all the files have been successfully (I hope!) moved. It took some doing, though.

I got the Data Lifeguard executable last evening and created a boot floppy, and set to work about midafternoon today. The drive was partitioned and formatted with no problem, but I now think I know the REAL reason why XCOPY wouldn't work yesterday; two of the three partitions that I was trying to copy over were found to have bad FAT tables (I was able to transfer the third with DLG). I ended up doing it the laborious way, booting to Safe Mode and copying everything in the two partitions to C:, then putting the new drive in and moving everything back. It took three and a half hours in total, but everything seems to be working now.

There are still some kinks to work out, I think - the "DMI Pool" message at system start is taking longer to clear than it did previously, and there's a message that's going by too fast for me to catch before the Windows startup menu comes up; also, on initial access to the secondary drive after start, access to the _first_ file is slow, though it becomes very fast thereafter (I think defrag operations may be in order on the three partitions with data) - but on very limited experience so far, everything seems to be working properly.

-Joe-

Originally posted by gwallen4:
The WD software is called Data Lifeguard Software and it can partition the drive to any size.

After the drive is partitioned and formatted. Use the advanced options in the software to copy the data. It will create an exact copy.





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Alternate email: joea64@yahoo.com

[rond36]

Don't worry about UDMA or no UDMA because UDMA does not work in DOS anyway. In DOS all drives run in PIO only, because no DOS drivers are loaded for UDMA. When you get the drives transfered be sure to enable UDMA on that WD400BB I have one just like it and UDMA is disabled by default in the firmware and you have to enable it using the lifeguard tools

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How to Use Fdisk and Format to Partition or Repartition a Hard Disk (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q255867)
How to multi-boot Windows XP (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/using/howto/gettingstarted/multiboot.asp)
Microsoft Expert Zone Multi-booting made easy (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/columns/russel/september10.asp)
MSKB How to multi-boot Windows XP (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q306559)

[This message has been edited by rond36 (edited 05-30-2002).]

[This message has been edited by rond36 (edited 05-30-2002).]

[Paleo Pete]

Hi there
I couldn't be bothered to read all you wrote, but If you are trying to move the contents of one drive to another you cant just copy it,you need a program like drive image to clone it.
Nev

If you can't "be bothered" to read ALL the information posted, don't "be bothered" to post an uninformed response. We're not here to give people halway, halfwitted answers. If you want to move data from one drive to another, a cloning program is NOT required. It can be done, although it can be tedious. If you intend to attempt a response, we expect you to read EVERY WORD, same as the rest of us do. Otherwise, you don't know the whole story and shouldn't be trying to respond.

The drive manufacturer's software usually works great, the DOS xcopy /s command should also work. The /s switch means to copy subdirectories. The plain copy command would work, but would be very tedious, since it can't copy subdirectories. The manufacturer's software is the best choice by far.

I'm not sure why xcopy was having problems, it might be due to having so many partitions to deal with, I'm not sure, that one is really puzzling me...the start up disk should know where it put the drive letters, and I know of no reason a command telling it to copy files from D should be looking for them on any other drive.

To use the copy command you would simply have to switch to each directoy in turn and copy files from there, and make directories beforehand to put them in on the target drive. That's why it's really tedious, but I've had to do it. No other way to transfer DOS 3 to another drive...xcopy didn't exist until DOS 3.3. The move command, DOS 6 and up, would also work, but I can't find anything indicating whether or not it will also move subdirectories.

Now I'm gonna be wondering for days why xcopy acted so strange...I hate it when that happens... http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

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[david eaton]

I think, from re-reading these posts, that the reason for the error message "bad command or file name" when trying to run xcopy is actually quite simple. It is not included on a standard windows boot disk. Or, at least, it is not included on the win95 or 98 disks. Can't tell you about winXP. Hope that stops your worries Pete.

David

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If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve the man, but disimprove the cat.

Mark Twain

[gwallen4]

The reason why copy and xcopy may not work:
http://navasgrp.home.att.net/tech/clone_copy.htm

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Sandman

[joea64]

Well, I'm glad to report that the WD400 seems to be working just fine after a week. I did run the Data Lifeguard tools, as I mentioned earlier, and though I don't remember for sure whether or not I specifically activated UDMA, I must have, because the drive is working at ATA/UDMA 100 just like the primary drive (a Maxtor 20GB).

I think that the reason xcopy wasn't working was really rather simple; two out of the three partitions I was trying to copy over had bad FAT tables, although I didn't find this out until I ran Data Lifeguard and attempted to clone the partitions. Therefore, instead of going through the _really_ tedious DOS route, I chose to go the _moderately_ tedious route.

I used Data Lifeguard to copy over the one partition that did have a good FAT table, then pulled the drive, put the master drive back in, booted to Safe Mode of Windows 98, and copied all the data from the two remaining partitions to separate folders on the C: drive labeled "Drive D" and "Drive H" (where D and H were the logical drive letters in question - my own partitioning scheme has the secondary drive split up into six logical drives, D, E, F, G, H and I. E, F and I were empty at the time; F had been successfully moved by Data Lifeguard.) Having done this, I put the new secondary drive back in, started Safe Mode again, and then moved all the data back into its proper partitions. This was a time-consuming operation as about 4 - 5 GB total of data was involved, but no problems were noted and the transfer concluded successfully.

That having been done, I rebooted the system in normal mode. For the first few days of operation, I noticed that boot was slightly slower than normal, and in particular that the message "Updating DMI Pool List" which flashes at system boot (Award BIOS) was taking longer to clear than normal, but this no longer occurs and system boot is as fast now as it normally is. As mentioned above, both drives are recognized by the system as ATA100 and appear to be operating in the proper UDMA mode, though I'm not really sure how to check this to make 100% sure of it. The only factor that might slow down system performance now is that the secondary runs at 5400 rpm while the primary runs at 7200 rpm, but I don't see this as being terribly significant because all system files, including the swap file, are kept on the primary; the secondary is meant for data storage and non-critical programs (i.e., games and such.)

-Joe-

Originally posted by Paleo Pete:

The drive manufacturer's software usually works great, the DOS xcopy /s command should also work. The /s switch means to copy subdirectories. The plain copy command would work, but would be very tedious, since it can't copy subdirectories. The manufacturer's software is the best choice by far.

I'm not sure why xcopy was having problems, it might be due to having so many partitions to deal with, I'm not sure, that one is really puzzling me...the start up disk should know where it put the drive letters, and I know of no reason a command telling it to copy files from D should be looking for them on any other drive.

To use the copy command you would simply have to switch to each directoy in turn and copy files from there, and make directories beforehand to put them in on the target drive. That's why it's really tedious, but I've had to do it. No other way to transfer DOS 3 to another drive...xcopy didn't exist until DOS 3.3. The move command, DOS 6 and up, would also work, but I can't find anything indicating whether or not it will also move subdirectories.

Now I'm gonna be wondering for days why xcopy acted so strange...I hate it when that happens... http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif





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Alternate email: joea64@yahoo.com

[mjc]

Right, rotational speed is a major factor in accessing the drive, so you want the fastest one as the main, because it is only a factor when it is spinning. So a drive that is used for just data sorage and not trying to boot the OS is not going to any impact on the overall speed of the OS. Only when you are trying to open a large file on the slower drive (it may take 3 seconds instead of 2)....but most files are not going to so large that you would notice.

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mjc
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