Looking for new hard drive advice

English Hardware
1

I’m leaving in a few days for a vacation to another continent (N.America) to ski and visit my mother. When at my mother’s I had planned to install a second hard drive on her PC (160 GByte) to either augment or replace her current 60 GByte drive.

Currently her PC tri-boots (on the 60GByte drive) to:

  • winXP # for all the family but me and my mother
  • winME # for my mother (when its running)
  • openSUSE-10.2 # for my mother when winME is not running.

My mother wants me not to lose winME. I can’t re-install it easily, as old service packs are long since impossible to find and without service packs the PC is a menace on the Internet (even with its a bit of a menace, although she does have a good router (and winME ) firewall to partially protect).

I took pictures of the inside of her PC when I was last at her place (about 1 year ago).

I’m worried about the cabling if I tried to install a second drive. … To illustrate, take a look at the following pix.

Pix-1:
http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/2419/maryspc01da4.th.jpg](http://img510.imageshack.us/my.php?image=maryspc01da4.jpg)
The right = the top of the PC in the pix. At the top of the PC is the CD-reader/burner, then blank space, then floppy drive, then power supply, and at bottom PCI cards visible.

Pix-2:
http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/6908/maryspc03azi1.th.jpg](http://img152.imageshack.us/my.php?image=maryspc03azi1.jpg)

This pix-2 better illustrates my cable wiring concerns. Power supply on left. Top = CD drive, blank space, then floppy drive, circuit board. Current 60 GB maxtor hard drive on right. PCI slots at bottom.

I had wanted to place new hard drive in blank space (between floppy drive and CD drive), but with IDE connections in this old PC, I can’t see how I can run cable from mother board to current 60 GB maxtor, to new hard drive. So I don’t think two hard drives can share the same cable. Hence I think I need to put the CD drive and the new hard drive on the same cable, … if it is possible (they will be adjacent to each other). But I don’t have the cable and I do not know the dimensions in advance (prior to arriving). I should have measured last year. My 82-year old mother is not going to crawl inside the PC for me (in advance) either. In addition to living a continent away from me, she also lives far from any computer store (1 hour drive) which is not so great a store, and 2 hours away from a “Future Shop” and “Radio Shack” which are better stores for parts. So I need to specify/measure things very carefully in advance. I’m only visiting her for 6 days and at most I will get one visit to the “Future Shop” / “Radio Shack” computer store.

Alternatively, an easy approach may be to remove 60 GB maxtor and insert new 160 GB drive, but I don’t want to re-install winME on new 160 GB drive, except for one thing. She wants me to keep winME. < sigh > I can’t chuck winME as 82-year old mother would not forgive me. :slight_smile: I would need to learn how to image WinME to new drive such that it is bootable on its own parition. Thoughts? Is imaging winME and then copying to a new drive (to boot in its own partition) easy to do?

Or should I stick with appoach of adding new 160 GB drive as secondary drive and wrestle with the cabling?

2

Not a good idea to put a hd on the same ide cable as a cd/dvd. This will cause a reduction in the hd performance.

Best bet is to try and get both hd’s on the same ide cable,and make sure you use an 80 wire IDE cable if it is not already an 80 wire. Cant tell from the pic. Again using 2 hds on a 40 wire cable will have a performance hit.

It does look unlikely that the above can be achieved.

There are long ide cables available on the market, not sure if one would work in your scenario.

Your other solution is a good idea and very easy with the right software.

I would suggest using software such as Acronis 11 to image the entire 60GB drive to the new 160gb drive.

3

Thanks for the suggestion … as you note, “with the right software” is the key. I will have an external 60GB hard drive with me that I could use to back up the two Windows partitions (winME and winXP … I don’t care too much 'bout the Linux as that is easy for me to re-install). I suppose I could also plug in the internal 160 GB drive but not fastened (when the PC case is open) and image then to the 160GB drive directly … and then shut down, swap drives (change pins on the 160 GB to make it primary) and then presumably its done.

I note Acronis is commercial software, although not too expensive, given I could waste hours doing this if I mess it up. …

Still, I can’t help but wonder if there is not a free openSource software approach. I note partimage: Main Page - Partimage

and if I knew “dd” better, I suspect it is also a potential approach … but its not the most friendly way and I don’t have a lot of time to brush up on its use (I’ve been very lazy over the years and did my best to ignore it) . …

Any one with experience with various hard drive imaging software ?

4

I’ve only ever used Acronis 11 and that would indeed work perfectly, however if you check out the ultimate boot cd which is free and has a mix of linux/dos tools it has about 3 or 4 hdd cloning tools, so i imagine at least one of those would work okay, but i’ve never actually tried one.

5

i do know that WD drives if bought brand new come with software for imagining hardrives one to another

6

How is that 60GB doing in terms of disk errors, have you got SMART monitoring it? If it’s nearing end of life you may have no choice but to move everything to a new drive.

7

Gulp ! I confess I have not set up SMART monitoring on my mother’s PC. I’m guilty there. :frowning:

I do log in every few weeks, and keep openSUSE-10.2 up to date on her PC. I typically train her on her PC (on openSUSE-10.2 using vnc and long distance on the phone) around once/month. Support for 10.2 stopped in November, so I’ve only been updating Packman packages (as they have not yet stopped 10.2 support, although I anticipate that won’t be long before Packman support for 10.2 stops).

I’m beginning to think my “favoured” re-cabling approach may not be such a good idea. The 160GB drive is new. The 60 GB drive is 7 years old. The new 160 GB is an OEM sale from the local PC store. It comes with no documentation. No disks. But a cheap price. Thats typically how I purchase any new external hard drives.

8

New disks should be backward compatible with old controllers, it’s just that you will not be able to use faster transfer modes. The cable is probably already 80 conductor, if not, one is needed.

I think the reimaging idea has the most prospect. I’ll have to defer to others where it comes to reactivating (if at all) Windows after the image has been transferred. I’m glad FLOSS has none of this nonsense of reactivation after hardware change.

You should be able to install the smartmontools package from a RPM even though it is no longer in support.

9

My thoughts are.

  1. 7 years is pretty good longevity for a hard drive.
    I’m not sure how many more years you can get out of it.

  2. The power supply in some of the Dells aren’t real robust. So probably the less you had running off of the power supply the better off you would be.

  3. If you had to run both drives. I would cable the secondary drive to the cdrom drive.

  4. Is the new drive you got IDE or Sata?

  5. Probably easiest way would to clone the 60 gig onto the 160 drive. But I’m not totally sure if Linux and windows clone nicely together. I have never tried it.

10

New drive is IDE.

I’ve been researching this, looking at dd and partimage. For a user starting with minimal dd/clone-disk knowlege, its not as easy as I had hoped. The physical approach, if doable (and if the smaller old hard drive could survive, and if the cable could reach), would be much easier.

The replacement of the 60 GB with the 160 GB is fraught with some complications.

Finding the “dd” commands to copy a partition appears straight forward. There is also partimage for copying a partition: Main Page - Partimage

But to copy partitions, and end up with a bootable new hard drive appears unlikely without lots of work.

Questions started to come up in my mind, as some Linux files can be hardware specific (such as fstab, maybe hal) and so doing a dd duplication, and expecting a larger hard drive to boot, may not be so easy. Still, loosing Linux is not a concern, as I plan to replace 10.2 with 11.1. But I need to ensure I do not lose winME/winXP and that I retain the capability to boot winME/winXP. Given my total lack of windoze knowledge, that gives me some pause.

So currently, the issue of the MBR and booting to the larger drive has me puzzled.

… anyway, I need to give this some thought.

11

Hi oldcpu,

I’ve changed a 40GB IDE HD for a 80GB HD in my wife’s computer about a year ago. She had four partitions: winXP, swap, root and home.

The easiest way, since it’s a direct cloning (not trough the network), was to use a liveCD (any will suffice) and the dd command.

You’ll have to install the second hd either as slave of the first or of the CD drive. On the CD IDE it will be a little slower, but since it’s a one-time thing, I don’t think it matters. There’s also no need to worry about cable length, as you you can place the second HD anywhere, just for the cloning process. Just check that you have an available power connector for the HD, and maybe a spare IDE cable.

Then you boot from the liveCD and at the terminal you type:

# dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdX

without partition numbers, where X is the NEW hd, either b or d assuming your original HD is hda and your CD drive is the second IDE primary hdc.

This will copy the entire contents of /dev/hda, including the partition table and MBR to the new HD. Note that there is no progress indicator except for the HD activity led. In my case it took about 16 minutes, IIRC.

Then remove the old HD, install the new one in it’s place (don’t forget to set the master jumper accordingly).

Since the new HD (160GB) is a clone image of the old one (60GB), you’ll have about 100GB of unpartitioned space, so boot again with the liveCD and use a partition tool to create a new partition or extend the last one.

Easy, and you still get a perfect backup in the old drive, which, after seven years, should be retired anyway.

The only issue you may encounter is if the drive has bad sectors dd will fail.

Now, if you are very paranoid (as dd won’t touch your source drive), you can backup the MBR and partition table beforehand.

To backup the MBR:

# dd if=/dev/hda of=hda.mbr count=1 bs=512

hda.mbr is just a filename, use what you like.

To backup the partition table you can:


# sfdisk -d /dev/hda > hda.sf

To restore this files to the HD:

# dd if=hda.mbr of=/dev/hda
# sfdisk --force /dev/hda < hda.sf

And then maybe use partimage or something to copy the partitions.

But again, only if you are really paranoid :slight_smile:

12

I would definitely use disk imaging software. Have used acronis true image for years though it no longer works as of 11.0 due to the lager inode size.
However it is easy to use and will create a functional image that can be applied to the new disk. Done it plenty of times.

Have tried partimage but find it harder to use. But will pursue.
Clonezilla is an other option

You will probably have to reactivate XP

Good luck

/Geoff

ps if you decide to go for acronis pm me i’ll be glad to help

13

brunomcl wrote:

> Since the new HD (160GB) is a clone image of the old one (60GB), you’ll
> have about 100GB of unpartitioned space, so boot again with the liveCD
> and use a partition tool to create a new partition or extend the last
> one.

Be careful with this - I had drive where the partition table was ordered
primary, primary,extended, primary in the 4 slots which bounded the
extended partiton and sandwiched it between 2 primaries. Even with free
space beyond the last primary and the end of the disk I had real grief
doing anything with that stupid drive! I finally got it working right when
I removed the 4 entry (the 3rd primary) and expanded the extended partition
by allocating an extend logical partition to take up the rest of the
now-free disk. After that I could do what I wanted with the extended
partitions but it was a struggle!

–
Will Honea

14

Good point. That’s a very odd partitioning scheme. I personally have never encountered a primary partition after a logical one.

However I don’t think this will be a problem to oldcpu as he is planing to replace 10.2 with 11.1, and typically the windows partitions are first.

What I’m curious is if you can use dd, which is much easier than partimage / proprietary software (argh…) to clone a partition- not an entire drive - to a new, larger partition, after creating them as you want. That way you could, for example, increase the windons partitions size without creating a new logical drive (D: or whatever). I’ll try that sometime if I have the opportunity.

15

I need to wait until tomorrow night, when my mother returns home. I’ll then get her to switch ON her PC, and access it remotely via ssh and I’ll run the standard checks (cat /etc/fstab … fdisk -l … df -Th ) to see how her drive is partitioned. If my memory serves me correctly, winME is the 1st partition, winXP is the second partition. I can’t remember which is active. And I think Linux is completely on the extended partition.

I’m also curious if “dd” will work. I’m not sure the best way to go about it if I do use ‘dd’. I could simply run dd on the entire drive and copy to the new drive. (I suspect I should pre-partition the new drive to 1 parition first, but I’m not sure). Then after dd is complete (copying the winME, winXP, swap, / and /home) make it bootable with grub (which I suspect will be easier said than done), and then switch 10.2 for 11.1.

Or I could pre-partition the new drive with larger (than current) partitions set aside for winME, winXP and copy those paritions over individually, and then try to make the new drive bootable to either winME and winXP (I would need a boot manager for this). Since I would need a boot manager, I’m not so keen on that.

One problem is I am time limited. I don’t have many days (only a few) in which to do this. So it has to be planned in advance with reasonable preparation.

I considered installing winME and winXP here (in Europe) on the new drive and carrying it with me to North America, but that is “pushing” the licence (even though the OS ends up on the appropriate PC), and I’m not convinced I should follow that. I would also need to lay my hands on a copy of ME with all the latest updates, and I think my wife and I threw out our legal winME a long time ago (I need to check the cellar for some old boxes).

I have received more recommendations for Acronis 11, but its not clear to me if that helps restore the MBR, or if it just creates a clone of the data but not the MBR. I hate spending money and my time when its not clear, as I could end up wasting both (which is one reason why I like openSource).

16

What worked for me was the entire hd copy, simply that. Everything was copied, MBR, partition table, etc. After that it was just a matter of replacing the old drive with the new and boot. I kept expecting something to go wrong, or complicate things, made a number of backups beforehand (see post above), but it was absurdly easy. This kind of thing makes you love F/OSS. :slight_smile:

Of course, if you are changing platform (IDE to SATA) or have a very old MoBo with antique BIOS that won’t support large drives you are in trouble, but that’s not your case.

17

Won’t work unless you have the same hardware (MoBo, mostly). At least you’ll get a dozen complications, not only with drivers but with XP activation. I wouldn’t care to try it.

18

Note you don’t need to partition the new drive if you’re copying the entire disk. dd does a raw copy, it doesn’t care about partitions/file systems/file types/formats, etc.

19

This makes sence to me.

Thinking on this, I assume when its done, I presumably will be left with a 160 GB drive with the first 60 GB as a clone of the old 60 GB drive, and the remaining 100 GB (actually less) not assigned.

Presumably the MBR will be messed up because the sectors don’t make sense with the larger drive ? And I’ll have to recover from that having a broken MBR, presumeably by either:
a. booting from the 10.2 installation CD and selecting repair or
b. going straight into a 11.1 installation CD to install 11.1 (replacing 10.2) and have grub placed on new MBR.

Before I clone from the 60 GB to the 160GB I need to initially partition the currently brand new/blank 160 GB to be 1 not-formatted partition (which will be over-written by “dd” (or by the software I use) ?? Or can I just leave the new 160 GB as is, and start right away with the clone program / dd ?

20

Just leave the drive as it is

/Geoff