Received a smaller hard drive,

J_Mac wrote on 12/27/2003, 3:20 PM
Continued Holiday greetings to you all. Santa Claus (Mrs.) gave me another hard drive which is smaller than my 'C' drive. Can I simply copy my apps and Win XP Pro to the new drive and use the larger drive for video, or is there a specific procedure to accomplish this without significant downtime? Thanks for your advice in advance. John

Comments

Caruso wrote on 12/27/2003, 3:50 PM
This is what I would do:

Make certain the new drive is prepared (formatted and detectable by your system). Then pull your existing drive out of the system and install the new drive as the master (check the manual for proper dip switch settings). Re-install your existing drive as a slave (again, check the manual or the label for proper dip switch settings).

Now, your new drive should be C and your old drive some other letter (depending on your system). Install all your apps to your new C drive. Then, carefully navigate to all your app folders on the old drive and delete them.

I assmume all your date is neatly organized into recognizable folders in your present drive so that you can identify them and avoid deleting them when you go to clean up your old drive.

If there's room on the new drive (or if you have a good backup system), you might want to move the data to the new drive, make doubly certain that it's really there in usable form, then wipe the old drive clean, and, finally, copy the data from the new drive back onto the old (this method will assure that all your old system files are deleted from the old drive - you can defrag or format it if you like.

The problem with simply copying your present drive onto the new one is that the installation routine of most software programs is a necessary step to establish where associated files are located on your system. Copying apps from one drive to the other will cause disruption in the paths to necessary files on the new drive.

I'm sure others can add to my advise and probably improve on it. I know this method works for me, though.

Good luck, have fun, and congrats on the additional storage space (you'll fill it up in no time!).

Hope this reply helps you.

Caruso
J_Mac wrote on 12/27/2003, 5:18 PM
Thanks Caruso! I'll give it a shot tonight. John
busterkeaton wrote on 12/27/2003, 5:32 PM
There is software available that will copy one drive to another. I have never used it so I don't know its effectiveness.

Powerquest Drive Copy is one.
http://www.powerquest.com/drivecopy/


You can also use drive imaging software to do this. Drive Image from Powerquest and Norton Ghost are two popular ones.

I used Drive Image to create backup images.
riredale wrote on 12/27/2003, 6:08 PM
As mentioned, imaging utilities such as "Drive Image" and "Ghost" can be used to make a clone of the original disk.

Another thing you might want to investigate is whether you already have the software needed to do this transfer. I think Western Digital drives, for example, come with a utility program that lets you copy the contents of the old disk to the new one.

Finally, you may not have to do any copying in the first place. With a utility such as PartitionMagic, you can split your original big drive into two drives. The "C" drive can be significantly reduced in size, leaving a blank "D" or "E" drive (depending on how you do it) that can be used for video along with your new drive.
busterkeaton wrote on 12/27/2003, 9:21 PM
riredale,

If you both your OS partition and your video storage partition are on the same drive, it is not optimal for video. Windows+Vegas will have to be active on one part of the drive while you are writing data to another part of the drive. This will drop your effective drive speed and could lead to dropped frames in your render. The better solution is to have your system/programs on one drive and video storage on another.



By the way CompUSA has a sale on Partition Magic and Drive Image this week. Each are only $10 if you upgrade and send in the rebates. If you're not upgrading Partition Magic works out to $30 and Drive Image to $40.
kentwolf wrote on 12/27/2003, 9:49 PM
Some things to keep in mind...

If you clone the disk image from the larger drive to the smaller drive, this will require resizing the partition.

I use both Drive Image and Partition Magic; both extremely valuable tools to have on hand...

I believe Drive Image will give you an opportunity to resize the partition you're copying. If not, you may need Partition Magic.

It will have to be resized at some point if you are copying images of different sizes.

It's not a problem at all to do, but it has to be done.
J_Mac wrote on 12/27/2003, 11:02 PM
Thanks for the advice. This project has been put on hold until tomorrow. John.
riredale wrote on 12/27/2003, 11:09 PM
Busterkeaton:

You're right, there will be a slowdown if you're reading and writing to the same drive, but in my experience I've never seen any dropped frames. These drives these days are so much faster than the minimum required for DV (4MB/sec) that the only time I've noticed a slowdown is when I have to copy a large avi from one partition to another on the same drive. They seem to loaf along when streaming DV.
vmcdee wrote on 12/28/2003, 2:02 AM
As we are all P.C. users, we know how touchy our systems can be. I would recomend not having program files and operating files on the same physical drive as your video. Further more, dont put any paging files on the same drive as your video. It will cause dropped frames and sync problems. And it can have a majore affect on capture as well.

all in all, keep your system optimized and keep it all seperate, an ounce of prevention save hours of editing time.

Good luck!

v