internal hard drives

Ok, I am having a hard time dropping this imaging thing
I often have a hard time letting things go. I'll decide to drop something then find myself going right back to it.
I think since I have the XP computer - I might like to play with it a bit.

If I can find a hard drive at a reasonable price, I think I might like to get it and try repalcing the one in the xp computer. This will be for a learning experience, and also, if can get it to work, then I'll already be set if something happens to the hard drive. I'll already have spare and also will feel more free to play and try stuff. If I end up killing the computer, guess I'll give it a funeral and try to move on .

I am not sure I'll even be able top take out the current dirve and install a new once much less restoring the image. But I would like to find out one way or another. I would not have the nerve to try this on my primary computer.

The drive currently in the XP comptuer is a:
Seagate ST3160815A
3.5 form factor
interface PATA
size 160G

So, for the image to have a chance at working - I need at least 160G but don't really need any larger.

I am pretty limited as to where to get one. We really don't have any place around here - WalMart carries a small selection. For online I only order from a few places - places I know: WalMart, Amazon etc.

From what I am finding, most of the internal hard drives are now SATA - so may not have a large selections for a PATA drive.

I have a $50 gift card from WalMart that I have been holding on to for a while - so if I could find something from there I could use the card and that would really help.

I found this one at WalMart.COM
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Western-Digital-WD1600AAJB-Caviar-SE-Hard-Drive/13050587

WHat do you think of this drive?

One things that concerns me is that the description includes the term: OEM
I know that OEM stand for original exquipment manufacturer.
But, don't know what it really means as far as ordering a hard drive with that designation.
Can someone tell me if I should be concerned about ordering that drive with the OEM designation?

If I try this and kill my computer at least I'll know for sure better than to ever try it on my new computer. Hopefully I will learn something one way or other.

Again, I don't currently have a problem just want to try to learn something. But if you have any suggestions about the computer in the link let me know. Unless there is a problem with it, it may be a good choise for now since I have the gift card, but if there is a problem that you know of,please let me know. If you have a suggestion for another one, let me know that.

Thanks,
Fay

That should be a good hard drive, Fay. I have a Western Digital HD in my computer and it has lasted a long time with no problems. You can read about the OEM designation here - it's nothing to be concerned about as far as I can see:

http://discountechnology.com/s.nl/ctype.KB/it.I/id.64/KB.74/.f

Repa,

THanks, sounds like that one should work out well for me. I didn't want to pay much and using the gift card will make it cheap.

I will probalbly wait till tomorrow. To tired to night to figure out how to order and chanrge part to my gift certificate and part to my credit card.

You gave the boost to go and and do it
THanks,
Fay

I just got the hard drive ordered - estimated delivery date is a week or a little longer. Sometimes the orders come in early though.
Still not sure I'll be able to get the hard drives switch out ok. Guess I'll have a bit of time to work on getting my courge up.

Fay

It should come with directions for installation, Fay. Just follow the directions.

Repa,

I have never been very good using tools, but I am going to give it a try.
I happened to find an old documetnation disk cd that came with my comptuer. The package had never even been opened. It has the instructions for removing and isntallting a new drive. I guess I'll find out how good they are when the new drive gets here.

I know ESD can be an issue. I will do it in a room where there is no carpet - and try to be careful .......

Not sure how long it will be before I get it done. I'll post back after I do and let you know how it goes.

Fay

You can buy a grounding strap with a velcro attachment to wrap around your wrist, and a clip or sticky surface to attach to your chassis that isn't more than a few bucks. Places like Staples, Best Buy, Radio Shack, etc. should have them. If you can't find one, be sure you discharge yourself by holding on to a metal portion of your chassis with one hand while you disconnect the cables with your other hand. Once the cables are disconnected, you can use both hands to extract the HD. If you can't find a grounding strap, just keep touching the chassis first before you do anything inside of it.

Repa,

We don't have any of those places here.

I think I did have a grounding strap but don't know if I can find it.
If I can't find it, I'll try to remember to do what you said.

Thanks,
Fay

You probably can purchase one at your local computer shop if you can't find the one you have.

Repa,

I looked for my strap and actually did find it YAY!!

Fay

The drive came in. Now I have to work up my nerve to actually do it. Will probably not do it tonight - maybe tomorrow night or Saturday.

Fay

Well, I decided to go ahead and tackle it. Workng on replacing the hard drive. WIthout the instruction that came with the computer that showed the insides I woul not have stood a chance I don't think. I am having trouble, but making progress. Got tired and needed to take a break.

Fay

YAHHHOOOOOO

It seems to have worked. I just restored and rebooted. THe destop looks like it did before. Used Macrium Reflect Free. May have to play with it for a while before I know for sure.

Fay

So tell everyone what you did, Fay - the steps you took. I'm assuming you replaced your old HD with the new one and restored the system image to it using the Macrium Reflect boot cd? Did Macrium Reflect patition it for you from the boot CD the way you had your old drive partitioned, and it do it itself, or did you have separate images of your c and d drive and restored each separately, creating the partitions yourself from the boot cd before the restore?

As I told you somewhere before, when I used Maxtor's Safetydrill to create the system image of my PC, it did both partitions on my primary drive, and when I went to restore them, it made one big partition of the entire drive and nothing got restored properly, so I had to do a clean install from scratch with my Win XP installation cd. I had no options to do the individual partitions or to interface and choose what I wanted Safetydrill to do. Sounds like Macrium Reflect might be pretty good, so I'd like to know just how it worked for you, and how long it took once the restoration started.

Repa,

I was talking with a friend about this and told her I should have kept a log of what I did to have for future reference - but I did not do that

The hardest part for me was dealing with the hardware. Had a difficult time getting the drives switched but finally managed to. One of the problems was when I put in the new drive, it would not lock it. Finally by looking at the other hard drive that was in the computer and the one I just took out, and remembering something I read - was able to figure it out. The old drive had screws in the side that "lock" it in. The new drive did not have any screws but did have holes for them, so I took the screws out of the old one and put in the new one - it then locked it - whhewww - I as just about to give up.

Once I got the computer put back together - I reconnected and put the Linux boot CD in the cd drive, I created it was macirum reflect free. The computer is set to boot from CD. It booted up to the Macrium reflect restore screen. THe image is on an usb external drive so I connect it. On the macrium relfect restore screen I had to tell it where the image file was - worked like a lotof things and list be "browse" to it.

I did not have the problem with partitions that you did. On my old computer both hard drives have only one partition, and I did not image the 2nd drive, just the main drive.
I had to select the partition I wanted to restore - I messed up there the first time - but fortunately it did not do anything. It showed the partition from the 2nd drive and I mistakenly chose it - I think it was showing as drive C. Anyway, it was a smaller drive and I got a message the partition was not big enough and I would have to selected a different partition. So, I selected the other one - I don't think it was showing a drive number (this is where I should have written down things and didn't). I think I had to tell it what type of partition I wanted to create and I chose active. The restore process started. I was afriad the drive letters would be messed up - but somehow it worked out.

I did not write down the time - but it took a while - probably around an hour. SInce it is a spare computer - not an enormous amount of stuff on it.

Like I said - I don't know how it would work with multiple partitions since I only had one, but it did have an option for selecting partitions.

I did try the Macrium Reflect Free image create on the win 7 computer. I have only one drive in that computer - it has 4 partitions. Macrium Reflect showed them all including the system partition that did not show up on Driveiamge XMl. But, I do not know how the restore would work.

I would never have had the nerve to try the resoter on my main computer - but decided I really wanted to try this - so did it on the old computer. Macrium reflect free seems to have worked great. I haven't played around much since I did the restore. But my desktop looked fine, had all the icons including the ones for stuff I had created right before I did the image create. Tried a few things and they seemed to work ok.

Not sure if I told you what you wanted to not, if not ask and I'll try to answer.

Fay

I just wanted to know whether or not you put the new drive on the cable where the old active C:\ drive was. I thought you had 2 partitions on that drive but now I see you had 2 hard drives with one partition each, so I am assuming that you took out the old active C:\ hard drive and replaced it with the new drive, then restored the image to the new drive and when you rebooted the drive letters resolved themselves so the new hard drive became the active C:\ drive and the other drive in the computer that was showing as the C:\ drive got relabeled back to whatever it was before you put the new drive in, partitioned it, made its primary partition active and restored the image to it - is that correct?

If I'm not mistaken, when a hard drive is placed on the primary drive cable from the motherboard, and it's primary partition is active (bootable), it becomes the C:\ partition and the other drives/partitions get relabeled if necessary. I think that's right, anyway. Is that what appeared to happen in your case?

Repa,

Yep that is pretty much it.

The new drive replaced the old drive - connected to the end connection of the cable. The other dirve was on the other connection on the cable and still is.

And yes, the drive letters resolved. I was concerned about that becuase at the time I was doing the restore - it looked like the old drive had become C and the new drive didn't have a letter. But in the restore process I told it to make the new drive Active, after it restored and rebooted, the drive letters were resolved.

If you try out Macrium reflcect - let me know what you think. It gave a choice of 2 types of boot disk - one was I think an advance version of BartPE (which I can not create) , the other was the linus boot disk - which in this case boots directly to the Macrium image restore screen.

Fay

Sounds pretty simple and good for just getting back quickly to where you were before a hard drive crash or corrupted Windows. I will try it, but will also in the near future create a Win XP SP3 slipstream cd in case I want to start fresh, and that way won't have to download all that SP3 stuff after reinstalling to XP SP2, which is what my Win XP installation cd is now. Thanks, Fay, glad everything went well for you. Look at the experience and confidence you've gained by doing that! Now, you can start a computer repair business on the side if your current job goes away.

Repa,



I am glad I did it, I really did want to give it a try, but would still not be comfortable trying on a different computer. The hardware part is really a challenge for me. I had all the documentation from my computer with pictures etc, and still had a hard time. But I did feel good when I got it done.

I could not do the slipstream because I don't have the cd , but since the xp computer is just my spare one, it is not a big issue, especially now that I know how to do the image restore. Seems like most of the time anymore - the computers do not come with the full windows CD. Looks like that can be an issue when trying to use some of the tools to do thinks like the slipstream CD.

MY new computer will still be under warranty for a while, so I sill not be trying anything on it even if there is a problem. But, I hope if I have a hard drive crash on it , whoever does the warranty work can use my image - to restore it instead of having to restore it to the way it was to begin with.

Now I need to remember to recreate my image if I install new software, driver etc. And on the new computer need to set up a backup schedule for the data I guess. I do backups, but don't have them scheduled.

If you do try it, I'll be interested to see how it works on a drive with multiple partitions. Before I created the image on the xp machine, I tried to add a partition to my C drive, but I had no otpiont to do that or to shrink the current partition. Did not want to try to mess with other software to do that. Maybe some other time - long after I recover from this effort

Thank for all your advice and encouragement.

Fay

fay47 wrote:

The hardware part is really a challenge for me...

If you do try it, I'll be interested to see how it works on a drive with multiple partitions. Before I created the image on the xp machine, I tried to add a partition to my C drive, but I had no otpiont to do that or to shrink the current partition. Did not want to try to mess with other software to do that. Maybe some other time - long after I recover from this effort

You're not alone wrt the hardware part - I'm all thumbs when it comes to that. I know what to do, but my hands and brain don't seem to work together when it comes to the hardware. I can't get a cable off, or I can't get it back on, or it feels like if I use any more force I'll break it, etc. I do eventually get it done, but it ain't easy and I don't like that part of messing with the computer! But, you have to do it unless you want to pay to have it done. Twice, I'v added memory to 2 of my computers. No problem getting the old memory sticks out, but adding the new ones like to have never got done - they wouldn't go in! I finally had to hammer them in ---- Just Kidding!!! It took forever, but they finally went after more than an hour of trying without breaking them! Don't really know what I did to finally get them to slip in, it just happened! My next challenge will be to build my own computer when I'm ready to upgrade - not looking forward to that, but I'm going to do it.

There are free utilities that will allow you to resize and add partitions without destroying existing data. Here's something you might consider if you want to resize your existing partitions and/or add new partitions on your WinXP machine:

http://download.cnet.com/Easeus-Partition-Manager/3000-2248_4-10982635.html

It's free and gets good reviews. Here's both a review and tutorial on how it works:

http://www.cravingtech.com/easeus-partition-manager-30-server-edition-review.html

It doesn't show that Easeus works with Windows 7, but your Disk Manager in Windows 7 can shrink and extend partitions without data loss. I read somewhere that someone used Easeus in Windows 7 successfully, but I would be cautious about that since it is not specified in the Specs for Easeus. There is another utility called Partition Assistant that works in Windows 7, and as I mentioned previously, there are some tasks that the Windows 7 Disk Management can do without losing data, like shrinking a partition or extending a partition if there is free, unallocated space adjacent to it. Here's a good article on how you can use the Windows 7 Disk Management and it also gives an alternative method for using Partition Assistant with the Windows 7 Disk Management to move unallocated space adjacent to a partition you want to extend:

http://www.extend-partition.com/resource/resize-NTFS-partition-windows.html

You might want to consider Partition Assistant as it works with both XP and Windows 7, and it's free. The author's site seems safe, but it can also be downloaded from MajorGeeks, which I trust implicitly, as they check all the software before putting links to it on their site. There's a short description and download links at MagorGeeks here:

http://majorgeeks.com/Partition_Assistant_d6463.html

and, it gets excellent reviews! Here's some you can look at:

http://download.cnet.com/Partition-Assistant-Home-Edition/3000-2094_4-75118871.html

Repa,

It is good I had the printed instructions for my computer - how to gt the side panel off, how to get the front panel off, how to remove the drive etc. WIthout it I don't think I would have stood a chance. The instructions were not that great but it pointed me in the right direction. I think in a prior post here I told you about the trouble I had getting the new disk drive to lock in - didn't know about the screws. So, I have trouble in that I don't know what to do - once I figure that out - I have trouble doing it I was so excited when I finally got the computer back together, but I was exhausted.

I hope not to have to mess with the hardware aware again soon. Don't thin k I'll ever be up to trying to build one and doubt I'll want to try to make many if any changes to the hardware.

But I may do some more playing around with other stuff.

You or someone told me how to add a partition on my Win 7 computer using the built in tools and I did that. It came with 3 partitions - C the main partition, D the restore partition and the System partition - no drive letter assigned. I added a forth partition K to hold my data.

Just a little bit ago, I downloaded the Easesus partition manager on my XP computer and gave it a try on the spare drive. It was one partition - it is now 3 partitions. Was very easy to use. Seemed to work fine. Thanks a lot of that link.

Later, not sure when, I want to come back, do the Macrium Reflect image create on that disk of the 3 partitions. Go in and do something, delete some data, remove the partition, reformat or something. Then try the restore and see if it restores all 3 partitions. Since it does not have an active partition, will not be exactly the same as doing it on the main drive, but I think that is what I will try.

Thanks again!!!
Fay

Well, I just really have a hard time putting this stuff aside once I get started. End up not getting anything else done and often giving myself a headache. But I just had to see if I could finish what I started with this.

See my post prior to this one.

I came back and tested the restore.
I put some data in the 2 new partition I had created. The first partition already had data.
I created the Macrium Image file image with all 3 partitions - put on my external hard drive.
Went to disk management and deleted the 2 partitions I had created.
Deleted some data out of the main partition.
This left me one partition and some unused space.
Booted up form my Maciium Relfect created rescue disk.
(Don't think I had to do this - could probably have run it directly since the drive I was going to restore is not the system drive - but wanted to try it this way)
Had to tell it where to find the image - just one file containing all 3 partitions.
One problem - the screen on which you select which partition to restore looks like you can select multiple partition - and it showed all 3 with check boxes, but it one only let me select one partition.
I selected the one that was the first one on the drive - had to tell it where to restore to.
It restored that partition.
Then said to press the back button to restore another partition or Cancel to finish.
SO, I pressed the back button - and went thru the process and restored the 2nd partition
Then did again with the 3rd partition
Then pressed the cancel button.
It rebooted back into win xp - and I checked the drive - all 3 partitions were back and my data was there.

Again, not sure if it would work the same way on a drive containing the active partition - but it did restore all 3 partitions on the 2nd drive.

So that may be all the testing I do on this at least for now.

Fay

Nice going, Fay. Think I'll give Macrium Reflect a try. Sounds pretty easy and straightforward, more so than DirectImage XML.

Repa,

Let me know what happens when you try it. As I said I did have not tried the resotere part on a multi - paritiotn disk contaianing an active partiton.

This was an intresting experience.

Fay

Repa,

Whenever you do decided to build your own computer I'll be interested in hearing about how it goes. Don't think I would ever try that and since I just got this computer last year - hope I don't have to worry about a new one for a long time.

I finally got the platters out of the old hard drive that had crashed back sometime ago - and I had stuck back in the closet. There were 2 platters. Had to get a 8T torx screwdriver to get the small screws out.

Fay