Combining 2 Hard Drives onto one.

[alexander]

Hello. I currently have 2 x 80GB hard drives:

IBM Deskstar: Master, Windows is installed onto it and the other non-demanding programs like Word, iTunes etc.
Maxtor Diamondmax9:Slave All the games like Half-Life 2, Rome-Total War, PES4 etc.

Because I have s shuttle the 2 hard drives are keeping it extremely hot, so I opted to buy 1 x 250GB 8mb Cache 7200RPM off Ebay. This has arrived but I have no idea on how to transfer the windows onto the new hard drive and boot up with it. I tried using Norton Ghost 2003 by "ghosting the windows" hard drive onto the 250GB. I then tried booting from this one and it did not work. I took from this I had done something wrong. Does anyone have any idea on how to completely copy all the programs onto the new hard drive so I don't need to install all the programs again (+ I have installed Windows too many times by reformatting the old HD when installing it into the shuttle)

Any ideas would be much appreciated, Alex

[Zathras]

You may have problems in that the installation locations for things on your second (D: or similar) drive may be hard-coded, preventing you from moving all your apps onto one disc without having to reinstall some. You could have 2x 125gb partitions or a 170gb and an 80gb partition and ghost one drive into one partition and another into another. I'm surprised your ghost didn't work as it's quite a simple procedure that I've done plenty of times. You did check you'd got the master/slave or whatever jumpers right, and you had the drive running on the same interface as the old one?

[alexander]

I moved the jumpers on the 250GB Hard Drive onto master after I had been running it i slave. Was I meant to change the jumpers back to what they were originally? Thanks, Alex

[StormPC]

Just remove the old drives, format the new drive and install Windows, reinstall your applications and copy any data you need off the old drives, and then reformat them also. That's the clean way to do it.

[Thorsson]

I'm with Storm. Ghost is all very well, but after a while any Windows installation gets full of crap. A new install means you don't take that crap with you.