Organising two Hard Drives

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tomsega

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I finally managed to get a new hard drive to accompany my ancient Seagate Barricuda. Its a Hitachi Deskstar s-ata2 drive that can go up to 300gb/s, so accordingly I wanna put system files, games, and other demanding stuff on that, and leave MP3's and stuff on the older one.

Do you think having the Windows files and games on the new disk is a good idea, or would it actually be faster to have system files and games on seperate drives?


Also, if it IS better to make the new disk the primary one, is there any easy way of moving internet connections, desktop icons, etc etc, on to the new disk?
 
Some hard disk manufacturer's diagnostic software will allow you to clone a disk and also to partition them. Western Digital's free diagnostic software does and I think it will actually work with any make of hard drive.

Other than that, you'll have to pay for some software to do the job, such as Acronis True Image.

To have the fastest system, I'd put the operating system on your new drive. Ideally, make a 20Gb partition on new drive for operating system and store everything else on new disk second partition and old Seagate drive.

Well, that's what I'd do anyway, lotta messing about but worth it in the end I reckon.

PS: If you go down that path, load Sata 2 drivers into existing operating system setup, you'll find them on your motherboard CD or maybe at Hitachi's Deskstar website.
 
Up.. Keeppning OS on the separate partition.

To resolve your problem, I think it's better to use Acronis Disk Director.

You can manage your partitions without loosing any data.
 
Do a fresh install on the new drive and put everything on it except the swap file and stuff you dont access very often.
 
Hmm... I think that's basically what I've done..

However, I'm confused at the moment because although I'm running windows through the new hard drive, that hardrive still appears in the safely remove hardware icon tray..

Obviously if I DO click 'safely remove hardware' it says that can't be done as the hardware is in use, but surely if everything was done correctly it wouldn't be appearing in that box whatsoever!

I really don't want to reinstall anything now because everything seems to be working okay, but the fact that my primary hardrive is E: but my secondary one is still C: is also a bit annoying.

Do you reckon it's a case of fiddling with some .sys files in Notepad.exe, or will I need some sort of Hard Drive software to get everything how I want it?
 
Normaly to change drive letters you would:
Right click on My Computer and select Manage
Select Disk Manager
Right click on the drive and select Change Drive Letter but this doesnt work for the boot volume.

I would suggest turning off your PC, removing the power lead from your second drive and just booting up the main harddrive. It may then default to c and if you are lucky if you then shut down, add the other drive and boot up you may get the order you wish.
Good luck
 
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