New Toy

This morning I went shopping, and as well as treating myself to a couple of steaks, some lamb chops and various other items of food generally deemed as being "healthy", I went to the computer bits shop and got a new hard drive. A whopping great 250Gb hard drive. I knew it was a mistake to apply for another credit card, but what the hell. The drive wasn't a fortune (in fact, it was less than I paid for a 160Gb drive a couple of years ago) so I can sort of justify it to myself. It's going to replace the ageing 20Gb drive in my PC.

Now, the 20Gb drive is the promary drive, which means it's the one with Windows on it. Since I don't want to reinstall windows and everything else that goes with it, I decided the best course of action would be to clone the drive. I'd done some hard drive cloning at work a few weeks ago, and knew that Acronis let you have a fully-featured 15-day trial version of their True Image software in exchange for your email address. I thought this was a fair exchange, so I downloaded it.

I took out my existing slave drive and put in the new one (as a slave). Then I discovered the PC wouldn't boot any more. What the...? A few minutes of thinking later, and I realised it must be the Linux partition I put on there. You see, a few months back I got an attack of geekiness and decided to install Linux as a second operating system on the PC just to see where it was up to these days. Linux installs a boot loader so you can choose whether you want Windows or Linux when starting the PC. So far so easy. Trouble is, the boot loader menu was installed with Linux on the slave drive, and since I've just taken out the slave drive and replaced it with an unformatted drive, the PC wouldn't boot any more.

Ok, let's see if we can uninstall Linux, or at the very least get rid of this boot loader. Since I installed Linux I only booted into it three times, so I guess I can live without it, and despite all my anti-Microsoft feelings and the satisfaction I get from getting something for nothing, it would have to go. I could always put it back on at a later date if I really wanted to play with it again.

Hiunting around on the interwebofinformation I discovered that the best way of getting rid of the boot loader was to reboot the PC with the Windows XP installation disc in the cd drive, press R for recovery, and then type in the command "fixmbr". Ok, couldn't be easier. Of course when I pressed R it asked for the administrator's password, and I couldn't remember what it was. I entered my own password and it didn't seem to like it. So I reboot into Windows, go into users, and reset my password. Turns out I am the administrator of my own PC (I thought I was) so I must have mis-typed my own password. Anyway, once I'd got rid of that, I fixed the boot loader thing and was able to boot up the PC with my 20Gb drive as the master and my new 250Gb drive as the slave.

Now to clone the drive. I started up Acronis, went through the wizard, and set it going. Ten minutes later it told me that it couldn't read from drive C due to a corrupt index. Bugger. Let's try scandisk. That didn't find any errors, but Acronis still wouldn't copy the drive. What I haven't mentioned is that each time Acronis decides it can't read the disc, I have to reboot the PC. Each time I want to start cloning again, I have to reboot. Each time I wanted to try and fix the boot loader, I had to reboot. I've booted the PC so many times today I'm afraid it's going to get straight on to the police web site and report me for giving it a good kicking.

So I gave up on Acronis. I booted the PC again (poor thing doesn't know what's hit it today) and went online to find other solutions. As I type this (on the laptop) it's busy cloning the drive using a freebie program called HDClone. According to the article that mentioned it, HDClone is an OK program, not the most fully-featured one out there, but it will clone a drive to a bigger drive. Which is exactly what I want it to do. It's copied nearly 12 million sectors so far, and found 115 defective on the drive. Looks like my old 20Gb drive might not have lasted too much longer at this rate, which is another reason I can use to justify the upgrade. It's only 30% cloned so far, so I'll have to wait a while longer to see if it's actually worked or not. Still, it's only taken me three hours to get to this stage, another couple of hours won't make any difference!

But I still haven't worked out what I'm going to do with 370Gb of hard drive space...