h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What a joy, your new computer has arrived and your old one is going to be for the kids to smash upstairs. But wait - all your lovely data is on the old one! The new one is simply an empty vessel, clean, new, and fast, but kinda useless. So, what's to be done? Here are some options for PC users with a typical single HDD running Windows, perhaps in order of ascending troublesomeness.

First, consider what you want to save. Experience states you need to save EVERYTHING. Your goal, then, is to make a directory on your new PC called ‘Old_C_Drive’ or something, and just clone the whole lot into it. Assuming your new box has a much bigger hard drive, this isn't going to take up much of it. You never know just what data you're going to need, or which old file, or which obscure driver is missing, or of course how to restore the old system when the kids reformat it. The programs themselves will be no use as such, as they will all have to be reinstalled – there’s no way around that one, sorry. However, if you're tight for space, before you start datalifting, go through the old hard drive and delete absolutely everything you know you won't need but that doesn’t do anything (like anything that ends in .tmp and all those fuzzy digital photos you downloaded as TIFFs in 1998). After you’ve finished, go through the new copy and delete all the other stuff that was used to make the old PC run - eg Windows directories, system backups, recycle bins, whatever. Have you decided? Good. Ready to copy? OK. Here goes.

1. If you've got some sort of network or broadband connection for both computers you might well be able to link them directly or upload everything to some remote location and then download it again into the right machine. In which case, get on with it. The rest of this is not for you.

2. If your old PC has a CD writer, you could write a copy of the old disk onto a CD, or two. Easy. Might take up quite a few CDs, though, unless your old one is really old, in which case it probably hasn’t got a writer.

3. If you are running Windows 98SE or above on your old PC, you could use a flash memory data transfer widget. There are millions of them on sale, and you can even use camera cards if you’re cunning and have the right adapters. However, flash memory is very pricey: anything more than 128Mb costs a lot of money. So you might have to do this a lot of times to get it all across. But it won’t cost you any CDs.

4. Do you know how to install a hard drive? If so, this is the easiest and quickest one of all. Remove the HDD from your old system, and connect it to the IDE lead which feeds your new system’s HDD. That’s the big wide flat grey cable (at the moment, until serial cables arrive, in which case you’ll want to read a different article) which has a spare socket about half-way along it. You also need to connect a power lead from your new PC to the back of the old HDD. Don’t worry about mounting it, just sit it somewhere convenient. If the leads are a bit short (and they will be) you might want to sit it on a shoebox or something next to the new machine. Now the slightly tricky bit – you will need to reset the jumpers on the back of both HDDs to make sure that the new one thinks it is a ‘Master with slave’ and the old one thinks it is a ‘slave’. The directions for doing this should be on the back of the HDD itself – and they may be different for each drive. Now, when you boot up the new machine with the case off (be careful, don’t put your fingers in there whilst it’s running) you should be able to see two HDDs, one of which you can then copy to wherever you want. Once that’s done, just disconnect the old one, reset the jumpers on both drives, and you’re away.

Why not just slap in the old HDD, after you jumper it as a slave. Into the new system?
That is how I've always done it.




pedboy

Ha. Gotcha! That's why I did to my old machine and it blue-screened to buggery. A lot of disk drives from different manufacturers just won't work together. Ive seen it happen three times now under different circumstances.

If you are going to do this, and things start going wrong, then you know where to look for the culprit.

FM

It has never failed me, and I've done it over 100 times, testing and using it for work. for the "very" lucky guy!!! ME
I will add that the old HDD cannot have any bad sectors.




pedboy

Well, it seems like I'm specially cursed, which is why my nickname at work is 'Blue Screen'.

If just adding a newer drive to an old system, yea then it's common to set the old one up as a slave.

But since here there are two systems, and the old drive is onl y 'visiting' why bother with master/slave. Most motherboards have at least two IDE channels, ie support for four drives. Newer board have three and even extra for serial-ATA.

Just unplug the DVD or CD from channel two, plug the old drive in there, a quick visit to the BIOS make sure it's detected, and if you like alter a boot sequence even. Grab the data, then revert back to the DVD/CD after your done.

Fiddle with links - yikes, what do you mean your not using cable select mode anyway

If you don't fancy opening the box, connect via a NIC or even ye olde Laplink cable... Easy to buy, easy to make. Laplink software is oftern given away with a magazine disk. If you don't fancy mucking about with DOS link software, being as we are in the age of Windows XP.

Well, because you're gonna need the old HDD back in your old system, which is going upstairs to the klids bedroom, usually.

After you move (migrate) the data, then put the old HDD back into the old computer, do the brainwashing(f-disk,format).
Lastly NEVER let the kids alone with the older computer, it could cost you alot of money(it is your computer and internet connection).
Why not set them up in the same room?





pedboy

Just a wee tip for all you hard driving types. If you have more than 1 hard disk don't forget to buy a HDD fan to keep things nice and cool, especially if you are an XP user. If not you will eventually get the blue screen of death - the avenging angel. Your 'hives' will be destroyed and days or weeks of nightmare re-installations and recovery consoles will be your fate
I know...... I was that masked man
Cheers

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