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Dear Computer Lady,
I have a problem I hope you can help me with. I have an older computer. When we bought it, it came with a 2 gig hard drive. We recently had problems with messages saying we were out of disk space on drive C. We had the computer store install a second hard drive with 40 gig of space. I reinstalled my Internet service on the second drive and deleted many programs from drive C.
We are still having the same problem. Do I need to reinstall Windows on the new drive? If so, what about all the documents I have saved in Word? Is there a way to transfer my running system to the new drive?
Thank you for a great newsletter.
Donna
Dear Donna,
What you need to do, is have your computer shop set up the new, larger drive as your C: drive and create an exact copy of your old drive in the new one. This can easily be done using a program such as Norton Ghost.
What I usually do when installing a larger hard drive for a customer is to disconnect the original hard drive and get the new drive ready to use. This is done by creating a partition using FDISK and then formatting the new drive.
Once that is done, I hook up the original drive on the primary cable and the new drive on the secondary cable. This will allow me to boot into windows from the old drive and, using Xcopy, transfer the contents of the entire drive to the new drive.
When the contents have been transferred, the new drive is hooked back up as the C: drive. When you start the computer back up, it will look just like your old C: drive, except that you will have a lot more room on the drive.
Elizabeth