adding drives and partitions

[Beachcoffee]

I have one 160 gig HDD and it has two partitions. One is C: and has windows xp home on it and the other is D: which has the "recovery" data for restoring my system. In addition windows explower shows drive E: dvd r/w drive and removeable drives F,G,H,and I

Now I want to add a 40 gig IDE HDD. I guess this will be by means of the second ide connector on my motherboard. I wil plug it in and start the computer and go into the Bios to detect the new hard drive. Then I will exit the Bios and boot into windows.

Question 1: What is next? Can I somehow view the unpartitioned and unformatted 40 gig hDD? What drive letter will windows asign to it?

Note: I intend to ghost over my C drive to this new drive for backup such that the 40 gig HDD can be used to replace the 160 gig HDD and boot windows. Not sure what "ghost" utility is needed but I feel sure there is something on the market.

Question 2: If I use some partition manager software such as comes with the Ubuntu linux or Partiition Magic and partition the 160 gig drive C: such that it is divided into 3 45 gig partitions plus the existing D: partition what drive letters will these new partitions get? Note I intend to do this repartitioning once I get the C: drive ghosted to the new 40 gig HDD so that all on drive C: will be backed up.

I am not fixated on this 40 gig HDD...it happens that I have one. As soon as possible I would rather get a second 160 gig HDD so that I can make backups of all the partitions. Does anyone see any problems with this plan? :cool:

[Paul Komski]

Beachcoffee. It is best to start a new thread for a new topic and so you post has been moved to storage.

The new drive cannot be assigned any letters until it has a new formatted partition or partitions on it. If you go into Disk Management (run diskmgmt.msc) it will usually detect an unpartitioned drive and start an "initialisation" wizard. After partitioning/formatting using Disk Management or a 3rd Party tool windows will give visible FAT/NTFS partition(s) drive letters according to a set of rules (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/234048) (WinXP is the same as Win2000).

If you don't like the windows assigned letters (but with the exception of the system or boot partitions (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307844)) you can swap them around or use any available drive letter of your choice from Disk Management (http://www.duxcw.com/faq/win/xp/drltr.htm).

I intend to ghost over my C drive to this new drive for backup such that the 40 gig HDD can be used to replace the 160 gig HDD and boot windows. Not sure what "ghost" utility is needed but I feel sure there is something on the market

If you intend to ghost the larger to a smaller partition then consider resizing the Windows partition to match beforehand and don't partition the new drive or don't copy the partition at all but make a compressed image file (recommended) of the old Windows onto a new partition on the new drive. BiNG (in my sig) can do both operations or ImageforDOS (its cousin) can do the imaging on its own. If you intend resizing a partition and you have valuable data on the drive then do have backups of such data before you begin.

You also need to be clear about what you want to do after ghosting (if you do a direct copy) and in particular which drive you will be using and which drive you want to use as backup. It sounds like you want to use the small drive as a backup drive. If that is the case then temporarily remove the other drive after ghosting BUT BEFORE YOU BOOT UP EITHER WINDOWS. Next boot to the new drive on its own and let it reorganise its registry. You should get a message that new hardware has been detected (the new disk signature prompts this) and needs to reboot. Reboot. After that you can reattach both drives but it is best to keep two cloned windows from seeing one another.

Not sure what "ghost" utility is needed but I feel sure there is something on the marketOne can use CopyWipe (http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/copywipe.php) if cloning a whole drive but only from a smaller to a larger. BiNG (in my sig) or ImageForDOS or Partition Magic or Linux etc can all copy partitions from drive to drive.

Note I intend to do this repartitioning once I get the C: drive ghosted to the new 40 gig HDD so that all on drive C: will be backed upYou can ghost-copy if you want but it is more problematic and as suggested I wouldnt run both drives together. If you ghost-image to the smaller drive you can always use this to easily restore Windows to either the existing large drive or to a new one.

[Beachcoffee]

The operating system, programs, and data on the 160 gig HDD drive C: total about 13 gig. So it seems a no-brainer to want to be able to somehow install all this information on the 40 gig drive. But perhaps it is not so simple. Once I get the 40 gig drive physically installed I will do some experimenting. Ultimately once I get this backup drive made I will disconnect the drive and its power and let it sit. So it should not be a problem with the two operating system drives seeing each other.

[Paul Komski]

So it seems a no-brainer to want to be able to somehow install all this information on the 40 gig drive.
With that amount of data it should be a no-brainer to make image files of all the partitions but not a no-brainer to make functional partitions (especially if you let them "see each other"). Both Windows and you are likely to get mixed up if seeing "the same partitions" simultaneoulsly. Just create one FAT or NTFS partition on the small drive and then use either ImageForDOS or BiNG from www.bootitng.com which will do this admirably or else use another similar utility of your choice. These image files can be used to restore the system and an associated utility called TBIview can be used to restore individual files from the image files by making the image files appear as drives in Windows Explorer.

PS It's so long since I used any Symantec products that I forget if their more recent Ghost program can copy and resize in one manouevre - quite possibly it can. With BiNG you would need to resize the partitions first and then copy them if you want functional partitions.

[Beachcoffee]

well I made the recovery DVDs for my XP home system so I have that to fall back on if resizing the C: partition messes up. But I would prefer to make the 40 gig HD bootable with my current operating system. Once way I have done this in the past was in windows 98 SE and with a utility called XXCOPY.
www.xxcopy.com

On this system I had to create a bootable CD with Fdisk and Format on it. I have a 15 gig HD and and 8 gig HDD. I disconnected the 15 gig and connected the 8 gig. Then I booted from the CD and Fdisked and formatted the 8 gig. Next I hooked up the 15 gig and 8 gig together. Then I used XXCOPY to clone the 15 goig HD to the 8 gig HD. It didn't care that the 8 gig HD was smaller. There was an extra step to Fdisk /MBR to make the 8 gog bootable.

Wish windows XP would work this way. XXCOPY doesn't work with XP.

[Paul Komski]

XXCOPY doesn't work with XP
I think it should be able to copy the files on a WinXP or other NTFS partition but not from within that operating system. You would need to first create an NTFS partition on the destination drive and then start up Win2K/WinXP from another computer or another hard drive or a BartPE CD and run the program from there. You also need to run it with the correct switches to enable it to copy hidden and system files.

It certainly has its advocates but I am not familar with it or its command line options. It can of course copy to a smaller partition because, as with XCOPY, it is just copying the FILES. If run from within an NT-environment (Win2K/WinXP/BarPE) even if they are installed themselves on FAT partitions the systems (and hence XXCOPY) should be able to see the source and destination File Systems.


There was an extra step to Fdisk /MBR to make the 8 gog bootable.Fdisk /MBR (or the NT equivalent fixmbr) does not make a drive bootable - it simply rewrites the bootstrap code of the MBR. To make a drive bootable the partition table in the MBR needs to have the correct partition marked as active (you can do this with Fdisk or BiNG) and the relevant partition boot sector must have a bootable boot sector (fixboot from a WinXP Recovery Console) and the partition must contain boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect.com with boot.ini being correctly edited. You can run bootcfg /rebuild from the Recovery Consold to rebuild the boot.ini file or edit it directly using BiNG). One of the advantages or using software such as BiNG is that the partition boot sector would not need to be separately fixed (since the correct metadata is transfered by the copying/imaging) and you can also use it to set the partition active and to edit boot.ini.