Hard drive 3 way dance

[stuartf]

Current setup

Gateway 600- Hitachi 80gb 5k
T43- Hitachi 40gb 5k
T23- 30gb (not here yet so unsure of model, it is bone stock from IBM)

Desired setup

Gateway 600- 30gb IBM supplied HD
T43- Hitachi 80gb 5k (IBM branded, original equipment)
T23- Hitachi 40gb 5k

The two hitachi drives are both new.

What is the dance to get this done??

Thanks,

[t20user]

I believe you will have to reformat and reload the OS on each of the drive, not 100% sure. When I swapped the XP drive in my T22 with my XP drive in my T23 neither would boot.

[dsvochak]

You can do it using something like Ghost or True Image. I've never used Ghost, but TI allows you to clone drives using images instead of disk to disk cloning (as long as the new disk has larger partitions). If you've got an extra drive, or a CD burner you can do it. The easiest way would be with a USB hard drive enclosure.

From the TI Manual:

You can store images on almost any PC storage device: local hard drives, network drives or a variety of IDE, SCSI, FireWire (IEEE-1394), USB (1.0, 1.1 and 2.0) and PC card (formerly called PCMCIA) removable media drives, as well as CD-R/RW, DVD-RW, DVD+R/RW, magneto-optical, Iomega Zip and Jaz drives.

This is the process I'd use with a USB notebook hard drive enclosure:

1) Create a bootable TI CD. The instructions are in the program.
2) Burn an image of the T23 30g drive, to CD's for example (to be restored in step 6). You will want to "verify" the image.
3) Put the 30g drive in the USB enclosure, attach it to the Gateway and use TI to clone the 80g to the 30g. (This assumes you don't have more than 30g's on the 80g drive)
4) Put the 30g in the Gateway and boot it up. It may update settings and reboot but it should work.
5) Put the 80g in the USB enclosure, attach it to the T43 clone as #3 & #4
6) Put the 40g into the T23, boot with the bootable TI CD and restore the image you created in step 2

I've found that notebook USB hard drive enclosures often will not properly run when powered by the USB port. They often require a separate power supply.

I've never had a problem going from a smaller to a larger drive. I have had, using W2K, some problems trying to restore an image to a smaller drive. I've never tried it using XP.

I hope this is clear.

[LtTPfan]

You might consider downloading all the current drivers for all of your machines as you will most likely encounter problems at bootup when Windows detects the new (different) devices. If you have them all burned onto one CD you shouldn't have any problems installing them. Or, you can just cross your fingers and hope Windows will have the generic drivers or find the correct drivers already on your system. Note that some drivers need to be uninstalled before new drivers can be installed correctly. This is possibly why T20user's machine failed to boot. Swapping drives among different platforms doesn't always work in my experience due to the already installed drivers. Figuring out what is what to repair such a situation can be tricky. Even booting into safe mode might not allow you to find the problem as most devices aren't loaded and therefore don't show up in the Device Manager.