Techie help needed!

Joined: Aug 02, 2006 Posts: 85 Location: colchester, essex

hi guys,
not beening the most computer minded i need some advise.
i have just bought a new WD raptor hard drive to run my OS i am using a larger slower hard drive at the moment, and i want to uninstall windows from the large hard drive and re-install to the Raptor. then use the big slow drive for movies, pictures and other space hogging files. having never installed windows befor this will be a slight challenge, but i am sure i can figure it out.
my question is do i have to re-install all my drivers for sound and video cards?
and will moving all my programe files over cause any problems?
cheers guys!

Jackrabbit23

PS if anyone is interested i have an unused 300gig Maxtor DiamondMax 10 SATA hard drive which i am going to sell, if anyone wants it make me a sensible offer!

Posted: Thu Nov 30, 2006 1:29 pm

Right mate, there is not really a fast way of doing this unless you ghost your old drive onto your new drive. Personally i would not attempt this if you dont know much, it would be good for you to do it all properly so that you know you can do it and then you can start doing things like imaging your drive so you can just revert back to a clean install of windows etc.

Basically you need to:
*Backup all your data, docs, photos, music onto DVD or summat.
*Install windows on your new HDD, and install all of your programs, games etc.
*Now you can format your old HDD, and store all of of you Docs, Photos, Videos etc on there.

With a fresh install of windows you will need all of your drivers for everything, this means:
*Motherboard
*Graphics Card
*Sound Card
*Printers
*anything else that you needed a disk for usually

It is good to make sure you defrag your system disk (OS) with every new installed program, if you use something like diskeeper to do this it will make sure your flashy new HDD runs as fast as poss and you will get into game a lot faster etc.

Thats basically it, not really any shortcuts i would recommend.

LT!

Joined: Aug 02, 2006 Posts: 85 Location: colchester, essex

thanks LT.
just one more quick one
i have got all my drivers backed up on dvd, how do i install them?
just put the disk in and run as u would any game or programme?

jackrabbit23

Posted: Thu Nov 30, 2006 3:33 pm

Yeah you just execute them all individually and they will open up a setup and install onto your system. Its as easy as that!

And no probs for the help, as long as you have everything precious backed up you cant really go wrong.

LT!

Posted: Thu Nov 30, 2006 4:24 pm

Hehe and if your reading W00p - no he doesn't need Norton Ghost Smile

See W00p's made his millions advertising for norton on our forums now he doesn't even pop in and say hi Smile

Joined: Oct 04, 2005 Posts: 193 Location: Leeds, UK

Don't forget to set your raptor to primary master in your bios or it might keep trying to boot from your old disk. also if your old disk is IDE you might need to set the jumpers on the drive to slave, they normally have a little picture on the drive label showing the correct config.

When you get windows on the raptor you should then add multiple partitions to the old drive this will speed up defragmenting.

also putting your paging file on the secondary drive may give a slight performance boost.