Windows 7 Forums


Reply
Thread Tools

Reconfiguring hard drives

 
 
kevvyb kevvyb is offline
New Member
kevvyb's Avatar
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: London UK
Posts: 14
Thanked: 0
 
      03-15-2011
Hi

I am about to add another smaller hard drive to my system exclusively for the operating system.

Current configuration:

Disk 0 [1Tb]
Boot partition with Win7
Data partition
Disk 1 [1Tb]
1 partition for whole drive (mirrored copy of data partition, disk 0)

The point of this is to have both my data disk and the copy data disk the same size to simplify back up as I reach the point where I need the space currently taken by the operating system, which gives me more time before I have to upgrade the 1TB disks. I store a lot of raw image files and have recently encoded all my CDs as MP3s and am now archiving the CDs as FLAC files as well

I want to:
  1. Add the new 160GB drive as disk 0 for the operating system only
  2. Move current disk 0 to disk 1
  3. Move current disk 1 to disk 2


I plan to image my operating system (on current disk 0) with Macrium Reflect and hope to be able to restore that back to the new 160GB hard drive. I have been told that I can do that with with the existing drives in place which will make sure the new disk gets a different [volume] id.

The current drives are configured in IDE mode and there are two optical drives as well, one SATA the other my old IDE connected to the IDE port.

As both the current 1TB drives are the same model I am trying to work out which is which and so what SATA port they are connected too. I've extracted the serial number with Intel Storage tools so can probably do this manually (although I may have to take out the large graphics card unit to get a good look at the SATA ports on the mobo!)

Can I assume that in this BIOS screen channel 0 is disk 0 and channel 1 is disk 1 in my set up?

Can you explain the 'slave' optical drive on channel 1 to me? It's plugged into a different SATA port so why does it appear as a slave on channel 1?

When I have finished the transfer and hopefully not had to reinstall windows can I just then swap the drives in the SATA ports to make the order run as disk 0 operating system, disk 1, data, disk 2 data copy, plugging them into SATA ports 1, 2 and 3...?

Mobo diagram (SATA ports)

The other reason for this reconfiguration is that I am also going to encrypt all the drives with Truecrypt. I have experimented with this and this too is easier to manage (and I think safer) if only the operating system is on the 'system' encrypted drive and both the data drives are encrypted as standard Truecrypt volumes.

Thanks in advance for any help and advice you can give me.
 
Reply With Quote
 
 
 
Reply

Thread Tools

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Trackbacks are On
Pingbacks are On
Refbacks are Off


Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Hard Disk not detected in BIOS after new RAM installation?!?!? shadowalk Crashes, BSODs and Debugging 3 03-07-2011 09:33 PM
two hard drives socko General Discussion 10 10-23-2010 11:12 PM
dual boot xp and win7 on separate hard drives martygene Installation, Setup and Updates 2 01-04-2010 06:46 PM
Win7 64bit and solid state hard drives ronpeck General Discussion 12 11-25-2009 06:45 AM
3 hard drives, 3 Operating Systems..need help mpkelley20 Installation, Setup and Updates 4 10-25-2009 01:13 AM


All times are GMT +1. The time now is 03:19 AM.
W7Forums is an independent website and is not affiliated with Microsoft Corporation.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33