Phred wrote in message
...
Rod Speed wrote
Phred wrote

I'm looking for a simple recipe to ensure success when trying to
install a second HDD on a Dell Dimension 4100 under Windows ME

Pay me to do it |-)

While that would be very convenient and enlightening,
I don't think it's very practical with you allegedly being
down in the deep south in that seedy drug city

Where we've recently had one of the drug kings executed, literally.

-- and that's not to mention the hole it
would make in my cheap plonk budget. %-)

True, that would have those real downsides.

(or even just mention of "gotchas" to avoid would be helpful .

Current 20GB drive is partitioned C, D, E, F using PM 6.0

Urk. Thats mad.

Yeah. Well, I'm inclined to agree and in fact I'd
be more than happy to ping off that "F". But C
is not negotiable; D is the CDROM drive on that
"managed" machine I mentioned so is unchangeable;

You appeared to be saying that the 20GB
drive had been paritioned into 4 partititions.

Which version is due to too much cheap plonk ?

so I need a "drive" E to align with the other's data drive

Cant understand this bit.

and (because I'm running Windows ME) I assume I can only get
that by having a D of my own somewhere on a HDD (the slave?).

Or this.

I want to install a 2nd HDD (WD 120GB) either as slave on the
same cable, or on the second cable as master or slave (see below).

I also have a CDRW drive (as G), and will be looking to
install a combo DVD/CDRW *or* a DVD writer "soon". So
provision needs to be made for both these optical drives too.

You sure the effect on the cheap plonk supply is warranted ? |-(

For compatibility with another ("managed") system,
I need to keep the same HDD partitions,

Why ? Thats a madly complicated config.

See above.

See above.

but would see C and D as being on the present master
HDD with E and F on the new one, if this is possible.

Thats pretty mad too. You'd normally want to have the
boot drive on the new drive, just because it would normally
be much faster than the original old dinosaur 20GB drive.

But that would mean partitioning the new drive as say 20GB for
system and applications and the rest for data and working space.

Yes, but that is normally the best approach if you say want to
ghost the OS and apps boot partition before doing any install
or service pack install, so you can restore gracefully from the
image if it all goes completely pear shaped. Basically have a
reasonable sized OS and app partition thats reasonably quick
to image to encourage you to image it just before the install
and to not just decide that the risk is small with the install of
something and dont bother to image the OS and app partition first.

[One problem I thought may exist with that approach may not
exist if I've understood one of your comments further down (q.v.).]

Not into those greasy greek abbreviations thanks.

An alternative that would be nearly as convenient would be to
have C and F on the present drive with D and E on the new one.

I'd bin that complicated scheme myself.

I'm happy to bin F, but I need E.

Spell out why.

So, can I have C and E on the new [let's assume
master] drive with D on the old one as slave?

Yes. With the Win9x/ME family you control that with the
type of partition you create. Primary dos partitions get a
letter first, then logical drives within extended dos partitions
get lettered after that, and with both sets, the physical
boot drive gets lettered before the other drive.

So you can get that result by having a primary dos partition
on the old drive. You have to have one on the new drive to
boot from, so that will see the C and D letters allocated
the way you want and the rest of the new drive will have
to be a logical drive in an extended dos partition and so it
will get the E letter, because its not a primary dos partition.

In fact, any combination that left C on the present
master (no doubt the only possibility anyway!)

Nope, you can have it on the 120GB drive and should.

Okay, okay... ;-)

and E plus another partition on the other drive, would be
acceptable (though that may mean some playing around with
existing batch files if the CDRW drive designation is changed,
and I would prefer not to have to do that -- but it could be done.)

You really should cut to the chase and have a much simpler
partitioning scheme, and the boot drive on the new 120GB drive.

There is also the issue of the best allocation of the HDDs and the
optical drive(s) to the cables. I've seen this recommended and
argued both ways: (1) keep the HDDs separate from the CDs so
that HDD activity is not so likely to interfere during CD writing; and
(2) put the CDs on separate cables so direct copy will work better.

The short story is that you are unlikely to be able to pick
the difference between those two configs with a proper
double blind trial and so its normally best to do whats
mechanically more convenient, and thats usually with
both hard drives on the same ribbon cable, and both
optical drives on the same ribbon cable. Just because
both hard drives are normally in the 3.5" bay stack and
both optical drives are normally in the 5" bay stack and
most ribbon cables dont have enough space between
the drive connectors to mix drives in different bay stacks.

Sounds reasonable. I was just a bit concerned
about whether the CD drives would do CD to
CD copy reliably if both on the same cable

Yep, modern burnproof burners are fine with that.

(bearing in mind the 4100 is only a P3 1.1GHz machine).

I did it fine in a 586/133.

But I certainly don't want to get into the ribbon stretching game!

Yeah, you can get one made for the other
config but its not worth the farting around.

The main uses would be:
1. Existing drive stays as the system/applications drive (C),

Not a good idea, see above.

and may contain a second partition (D or F)
that would serve as a data backup area.

Its generally best to have the data backup on a different
physical drive to the drive that its backing up, obviously
so you dont lose everything on a single drive failure.

That was the idea! The data on E on the new
drive and the backup on D on the old one.

Yes, except for the image of the boot OS and app partition,
done to allow a convenient step back to the situation before
an install. Thats fine onto another partition on the big new
drive, because its not protecting against drive failure.

If you do want to be able to recover quickly from a
hardware failure by just restoring the boot OS and
apps partition, its best to put that on CDs or DVDs
because you can see both hard drives killed by a
power supply failure or just theft of the system etc.

Its not actually a fantastically viable approach tho
because with the standard Win config, the email
files and other stuff like shortcuts and favorites
are normally on the boot partition too and so the
image file will be well out of date by the time you
want to use the image file for hard drive failure or theft.

What you can do is put the image of that partition on
the CDs or DVDs and in addition use a real backup
prog to save whats changed to CDs since the image
file was created. Then on say a hard drive failure,
you restore the image file, then restore the real
incremental backup too and you are back where
you were when the last incremental backup was done.

And the stuff thats absolutely irreplaceable
should be on multiple CDs as well.

Pretty well *all* my junk is on 4 (if not 6 CDs -- *finding*
the "irreplaceable" will be the problem if the time comes. 8-)

Yeah, worth giving one set to a mate etc for safe
keeping, just in case the place burns down etc.

In your case you could leave them
down the pub if you have no mates.

These are best done separately to the image of the boot partition.

2. New drive would be the main working drive (E)

Its normally best as the boot drive too, because it will be much faster.

but would also contain a partition to hold maybe 2 or 3 "Ghosts"
of the system drive (probably at least a vanilla system installation

No reason why that cant be on the physical drive since its
mostly protecting you against a service pack install ****ing
the boot drive up or an app install etc doing the same.

Okay, here's where I may have been too pessimistic. I thought
the clones of C would have to be on a different physical drive.

Clones do, image files dont. Image files are generally best.
You can keep more than one, with compression being possible
with image files but not with clones, with only a slightly slower
restore time if you need to do a restore.

Are you saying the "Ghosts" can simply be "files" on
a separate partition of the same physical drive as C?

Yes, ghost image files can be. You can use image files,
or true partition clones. Normally image files are best.

If so, that certainly would make a difference
to my approach, and remove that objection
to having the new drive as the master.

Yeah, its generally the best approach with a single drive too.
Two partitions, one for the boot OS and apps partition so
you can image that before installs to make it easy to go
back if the install goes pear shaped, the other partition for
all the data files and the image files. I just included this for
the other pervers at this traffic that may only have one drive.

But one other thought occurs:

Dangerous business, can end in tears before bedtime.

Doing it this way is going to mean a *lot* of thrashing of
the drive whenever creating or using one of these images,
given that it would mean the transfer of maybe 20GB of stuff
from one place to another on the same physical drive each time.

In practice that doesnt happen because the imaging programs
buffer the image file in ram until a big chunk has been done
and then dumps it into the image file in the second partition.

You do notice a difference if you are cloning a partition
instead of making an image file of it, but cloning isnt
normally the best approach for various reasons.

and a second one with the main application software freshly
installed too). [Or maybe I don't really need a partition for
that as the "Ghosts" are basically just files aren't they?]

Correct. Image files are, anyway. You can also clone partitions and
drives but there isnt normally any real point in doing that for backup.

I was thinking of two or three clones of C he

These are actually images, not clones.

1. Just the system and very basic stuff like drivers etc. installed.

Yes, I normally do create a few images during an OS install.
Mainly to minimise the effort if I stuff something up later in
the apps install particularly, I can just restore an image
instead of completely restarting the OS and apps install.

I normally make the first image of just the OS itself,
before any drivers are added, just because the addition
of drivers can produce a mess with some hardware.

Then when all the hardware drivers have been
installed, image that before installing any of the
apps. Just so that if that goes pear shaped, its
easy to get back to the bare OS and drivers config.

2. The above plus the "standard" applications (MS Office,
graphics, and basic utilities for mail, web, FTP etc.).

Yep.

And maybe,
3. The above plus other stable installations as they are required.
(This one would be "temporary" in that it could be
overwritten by new versions when other stuff is added.

Yeah, I normally create an image before installing anything,
and keep previous images too, basically because that simplifys
things if the problem with the latest install doesnt become
visible for a few days etc and it wont uninstall cleanly.

I basically only delete images when I need more
space for the latest one. No point in deleting any
image until you need the space it occupys.

I'm thinking I should probably start with this one for my
present working system so I can recover somewhat
if I have problems with that fresh install approach.)

That approach has its downsides, restoring that image
before doing an additional install. Basically Win keeps
quite a bit of stuff in the boot partition, email, favorites,
shortcuts, all sorts of minor config stuff like what
display format is used in particular folders etc.

So you dont normally want to restore before a new install.

3. The CDRW would mostly be used for backups and
other copies of data from E, and also for backup copies
of program CDs (and that may involve direct CD to CD
copies in future when I get the second optical drive).

I dont normally do it that way even when I do have the drives
that allow that. Its generally best to have the copy program just
copy it to the hard drive auto and use the same drive for both
the original and the copy. Modern burners are so much faster
that that approach has little effect on the total copy time now.

True. But you do have to swap CDs that way,
and it's been my habit to do this sort of copying
while doing other (non-computer) things.

You'll find that with modern burners on lower horsepower
PCs like that that the system isnt that usable while the
copy is being done, very sluggish, and that the burn is over
so quickly that I dont usually try to do much while it happens.

Tho admittedly I copy CDs on the test machine now.

So the thought of just loading the drives and coming back
later to a job done instead of half done, is pretty appealing.

Yes, but the system will be surprisingly sluggish with
modern fast burners and a lower horsepower PC like
that. I find it a bit irritating to even play freecell while
the copy happens, let alone say browse newsgroups.

Thats the main reason I copy CDs on the test machine.

And you dont actually do that that much so there isnt
any point in getting all anal about the time it takes anyway.

It would usually only need to interact
with C during program installations.

And you cant normally even measure any difference in the total install
time with the two drives on different ribbon cables for variour reasons.

4. A temporary consideration is the best (i.e. most convenient)
way of getting nearly 8GB of data off the present E partition
onto the new drive and into the new "E".

Most convenient to use ghost or drive image. You appear to
want to use that for boot partition backup anyway so you might
as well use it for the reconfig at new hard drive install time too.

I'm starting to see a lot of "gotchas" looming here for the neophyte!

Yeah, well worth thinking thru the config before implementing it.
You're gunna be using it for quite a while in the new config.

And if it all goes pear shaped I won't have access to the
USENET "help desk" of collective wisdom to sort it out!

Yeah, I'd never go back to just one PC again voluntarily.

So convenient to be able to drop an error
message into google and resolve it in minutes.

(That's one reason I was hoping for a pointer to a
"recipe book" of instructions for doing this sort of thing.

Trouble is that there isnt much agreement
on the best config so thats not that feasible.

You dont even get much of that with the basic question
of the best partitioning for a single and dual drive configs.

I clearly need to give the actual approach rather
more thought. The idea of installing a second
HDD seemed pretty simple at the time. 8-)

Yeah, computing has always been like that |-)

I can think of possibilities with PM, but it may
come down to CD shuffling in the end. :-(

Nope, it never does.

Just get ghost and use it for the reconfig.

Hints, guidance, recommendations, links most welcome.

Thanks very much for your input, Rod.

No probs, happy to keep discussing the detail for as long as it takes.