Windows 2000 and Cloning Hard Drives - Fairly Urgent!

Simmy · 30 Aug 2007 at 19:59

Hi all,

I was given the job of cloning a hard drive in a windows 2000 machine. Pretty straight forward job I thought. There were two hard drives in there:

C: - With Windows on
D: - Random (but important) files

I made a backup of D: to my laptop and proceeded to restore the backup to a new hard drive (500Gb IDE drive). Acronis reports its all done and I can see the files on the new hard drive from my XP laptop. So I go ahead and stick the new hard drive into the computer, BIOS detects it, Windows 2000 loads but fails to find the partition on the new drive :eek:

The drive appears in "Device Manager" without any problems. But it does not appear in "Disk Manager" or "My Computer". The original D: drive was 20GB and the new 500GB hard drive only contains one identical 20Gb partition. So any idea why it isn't detecting it as a drive and showing up in My Computer? Is it to do with the size of the hard drive?

This is one of those jobs that makes you feel sick to your stomach

All help very much appreciated.

brendy · 30 Aug 2007 at 21:01

How old and what model is the motherboard?

Simmy · 30 Aug 2007 at 21:31

I'd guess around 8 years old and it's an Asus K7M

ns400r · 31 Aug 2007 at 00:12

Connect the new hard drive to the Windows 200 system. Make/format the partiton(s) that you need. Take the newly partitioned drive to the laptop and then copy over the data you need. Make sure your Windows 2000 has the latest service pack installed.

Simmy · 31 Aug 2007 at 07:42

I can't format and partition the drive from within Windows 2000 because it won't let me access it. It will only list the drive in Device Manager.

I think I've discovered the problem though. It seems the motherboard is so old, it won't accept drives over 32GB in size! There is a new BIOS that will sort the problem, but I don't fancy flashing a motherboard this old!

m4cc45 · 31 Aug 2007 at 07:48

Not sure you can do this with Acronis as I use Ghost but I'm sure it will have a similar feature.

With Ghost I would copy the C:\ drive to the new hard-drive (you can choose the partition size in Ghost so I'd change that to whatever was appropriate) and then do the same for D:\ again changing the partition size.

That has worked for me before but, as I said, I don't know if Acronis can do that.

M.

EvilFranky · 31 Aug 2007 at 08:56

Simmy said:
I can't format and partition the drive from within Windows 2000 because it won't let me access it. It will only list the drive in Device Manager.

I think I've discovered the problem though. It seems the motherboard is so old, it won't accept drives over 32GB in size! There is a new BIOS that will sort the problem, but I don't fancy flashing a motherboard this old!

Why don't you want to flash it? It sounds like it could possibly be the best solution!

Why would the age of the board have any effect on the BIOS update :confused:

Datamonkey · 31 Aug 2007 at 09:27

quick one,

a lot of new ide hdds have a jumper on the back to limit its size, its there exactly for this sort of situation.

check to see if the new drive does.

partition it in 2k, connect to your lappy and restore the data.

Shame to lose all that space though. Flash the bios, g'wan

Simmy · 31 Aug 2007 at 11:23

EvilFranky said:
Why don't you want to flash it? It sounds like it could possibly be the best solution!

Why would the age of the board have any effect on the BIOS update

Or it could result in the motherboard being unusable, which is highly likely to happen to me

Flashing older motherboards has always been a bad experience. With it being so old, it's not like I can pop to the shops and buy a new one either.

Also the only BIOS I can find that sorts this problem is a Beta version :\

Datamonkey said:
quick one,

a lot of new ide hdds have a jumper on the back to limit its size, its there exactly for this sort of situation.

check to see if the new drive does.

partition it in 2k, connect to your lappy and restore the data.

Shame to lose all that space though. Flash the bios, g'wan

Cheers, but all the jumpers are set correctly (I did double check after you suggested it though

). I can't partition it from 2k either as it won't let me. I can only see the drive from Device Manager, but it won't appear in Disk Management.

Datamonkey · 31 Aug 2007 at 11:46

Simmy said:
Or it could result in the motherboard being unusable, which is highly likely to happen to me Flashing older motherboards has always been a bad experience. With it being so odl, it's not like I can pop to the shops and buy a new one either.

Also the only BIOS I can find that sorts this problem is a Beta version :\

Cheers, but all the jumpers are set correctly (I did double check after you suggested it though ). I can't partition it from 2k either as it won't let me. I can only see the drive from Device Manager, but it won't appear in Disk Management.

If the drive has the jumper i mentioned, I think its called size limit or something similar you will find the mobo will see the hdd with no issues and so should 2k.