Check the software that came with your new drive. I've recently purchased
Seagate, Maxtor, and Western Digital drives. All came with software that
copies the contents of an existing hard drive to the new drive. The
resulting disk is bootable. Making such a major system change may trigger a
reregistration requirement, though.
Also, your copying will be quicker if you make the new drive your secondary
master (or slave) rather than your primary slave. Otherwise the data has to
travel both ways on your cable (from drive 0 to processor to drive 1). If
you have the new drive on a different cable from the old one the process of
getting data from the old drive is not interrupted by the sending of data to
the new one. (At least this is my ignorant understanding.)
I run one of my systems with three hard drives installed. One drive is
partitioned into two partitions and four volumes. The second drive is a
primary slave and has four partitions, only one of which is visible to a
boot from the primary master. The second drive does have bootable
partitions. The third drive is also invisible to a boot from the first drive
and is set up as a duplicate of the first drive. I use Ghost software to
copy the first drive to the third on a regular basis. Every few months I
swap yet another duplicate drive for the third one and store the other drive
off premises.
If I boot from the second drive, all partitions on the first and third
drives are visible. That drive has different boot partitions as well as the
partition visible from boots from the first or third drive.
I use BootItNG to set up the partitions and hide them from a routine boot.
It provides me with a boot menu that lets me select which partition I boot
from. I can also switch which drive boots using my system BIOS setup. If you
are going to mirror your hard drive I would recommend setting a partition on
your new drive that is the same size as your old drive. You can then copy
that partition directly to your old drive for backup using either your drive
setup software or something like Ghost.
If you actually want to mirror drives you need drives that are the same size
(preferably same manufacturer / lot) and a RAID array disk controller. This
gives you two identical hard drives in realtime.
--
Charles Kenyon
Word New User FAQ & Web Directory:
<URL:
http://addbalance.com/word/index.htm>
Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide)
<URL:
http://addbalance.com/usersguide/index.htm>
See also the MVP FAQ: <URL:
http://www.mvps.org/word/> which is awesome!
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