Question Re Hard drives and Recovery CD's

[djhooper]

Hi At the moment I have a 10gyg hdd that was the original with the machine, so it has the O/S pre-installed etc. And came with a recovery CD to take it back to scratch in case of any problems. (Of which there have been a few)!!! I guess the O/S is partitioned off somewhere on hdd? Is that right? My Question is this, I intend to buy a new 40gyg hdd. Am I right in thinking that that will render my recovery CD useless? If so, is there a way I can "transfer" the partitioned O/S from my old hdd to my new one? Thus still be able to use my recovery CD. I have probably got this all totally wrong and be way off the mark on how I think this pre-installed stuff is done, but I was hoping to keep the functionality of the recovery CD you see. If I've made myself appear very stupid, then that's because I probably I am, at least that's what the wife keeps telling me! "Always on that goddamn computer"!!! Hopefully somebody will be able to shine some light in my direction. TIA, Daz.

[mattie]

My advice to you would be, if there is nothing wrong with your 10Gb drive, then leave it where it is and install the 40Gb drive as a second hard disk and use it for storing your data. I have two hard drives, a 2Gb drive on which I have the O/S and some programs, such as Internet explorer and Outlook. Everything else is kept on the bigger drive. If you have and IDE CD-rom, then you may have to buy an extra IDE cable, available from computer fairs and places like PC World.

[djhooper]

Thank you for the advice, but you see, I am replacing 2 x 10gyg hdd's with one 40 gyg hdd because my system can't cope with running 2 hdd's and 2 Rom drives (1 RW drive). Are you telling me that the question I posed is NOT possible?

[mattie]

In that case, what I would do is this. As you have two hard drives, leave the boot drive (C:) alone. Temporarily disconnect one of your CD drives and connect your new hard drive in its place and copy everything from the second drive to the new one and then remove the second 10GB drive. I wouldn't have just one hard drive in case it fails, then you have lost everything. Alternatively, some CD writing software allows you to make a hard drive image, if you have this facility then you could make an image of your C: drive and copy it back to the new drive, this would involve temporarily connecting the new drive in place of a CD-ROM as above. I've never tried this, so don't know how successful this would be. Or, you could buy disk cloning software such as Powerquest Drive Image Pro or Norton Ghost, however as you are not likely to use them much it may not be worth the money.

[djhooper]

That's great, thanks for the help, much appeciated! I will try those suggestions. TA Daz