How to safely add another hardrive safely without losing windows

[johnnr892]

Hi, i need to add an extra hardrive to my dad's pc so he can back up music, videos and pictures etc...there currently is only one disk at the moment and that has everything on it. My question is how do i safely add this extra hardrive (formatting it presumably) without losing the current windows install. I ask because when i tried to do it with my own PC i ended up losing everything, could somebody guide me through the procedure? Thanks very much, John.

[mike_w]

If the hard drive is already formatted, you just add it to a spare IDE or SATA port. Otherwise, you just attach it, and then format it in Administrative Tools - can't remember the exact name, but it's fairly obvious. That's it. Just make sure, if you do format it, you choose the right disk!

Try taking a look here: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000588.htm

[johnny02004976]

yeh as above really, i use partition magic for formatting/partitioning etc, nice and simple to use

[Atomic]

Prob safer for someone without much PC knowledge to format it thru the admin tools, it wont let you format C: then!

[pak000]

the only problem i could imagine is that if the drive you are installing has another copy of windows on it already, i've done that before and it causes problems.

[killie99]

just incase you don't know how to get to the disk management tool:

start > run> diskmgmt.msc <ok>

[Atomic]

just incase you don't know how to get to the disk management tool:

start > run> diskmgmt.msc <ok>

Or right click 'My Computer' and choose 'Management' and choose it from there.

[johnnr892]

Thanks for the help. All working, lets just hope that Western Digital have made me a good one.

[latrosicarius]

Once you get to disk management, you will first have to "import" the foreign disk. It will then ask you whether you want to "convert" it to a dynamic disk or leave it as a "basic" disk.

If you plan on changing partition sizes at a later date, choose dynamic, otherwise choose basic b/c if you make it dynamic, you cannot move it to another PC and import it there unless you have Pro edition of WinXP.

After you import it, you will have to format it. You can do a quick format. Format it in NTFS.

Then copy your dad's files to the new drive. Do NOT copy ALL the files (i.e.: You do not need to copy anything relating to Windows files or various program files). Just his personal files.

Places where files are commonly stored:
C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Desktop\
C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\My Documents\
C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Favorites\

And if you use Outlook it stores the PST files (by default) in:
C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.pst

If you use Firefox, it stores it's favorites in:
C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\bookmarks.html
Although, you can just Export your favorites to a file from within Firefox, and then just back that up.

If you don't want to miss anything, just copy the entire
C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\
directory with all of it's subfolders, but that would be overkill as there is a lot of nonsence system files in there.