At 02:02 11/19/03, Ian wrote:
>My existing 20Gb drive is about 3 months old.  Both drives are
>modern Western Digital 7200 rpm models. First I connected the new
>drive to the system as a slave and used XP's Disk Management to
>partition and format it.


Bad move. You shouldn't do this step. (See below.)


>Then I created and formatted 3 partitions on the new drive - a
>primary partition of 8Gb, a second of 10GB and the third partition
>taking up the balance of 102Gb.  (These sizes are nominal of course
>- the true size of a 120Gb drive is just over 114Gb)


Again, bad move. Don't do this yet. Leave the drive unpartitioned
at this point.


>My existing 20Gb drive has one partition, containing around 5Gb of
>data (all my other data is stored on two USB drives).  In theory
>Casper should have been able to resize this partition to fit into
>the new 8Gb slot - as I said, it only contains 5Gb of data.


Start this way:

First, use FDISK to make an extended partition starting at the 8 GB
mark [**] on the new drive and going from there to the end of the drive.

      [**] Yes. Leave the first 8 GB unpartitioned.

Create two logical volumes *inside* the extended partition. (The sizes
are up to you.) Reboot and format the two partitions if you want...
or wait until later to format them.

At this point, the first 8 GB of the drive should be unpartitioned free
space.

Now use CASPAR (which program I've never heard of) to clone the
original 5 GB primary partition into the first 8 GB of the new drive.
When cloning partitions (if Caspar works at all like other drive
cloning software), the cloned partition must be put into *unpartitioned
free space*. Don't put it into the extended partition...or any other
partition...because:

YOU CAN'T PUT A PARTITION THAT YOU WANT TO BE BOOTABLE INSIDE ANOTHER
PARTITION. [**]

     [**]  You can put files into a partition, but not a partition into
           a partition. [***] Well, there's one exception to this.

     [***] You can put a partition into an extended partition's free
           space, but then the new partition won't be bootable.

Now that you have a primary partition on the new drive (and this
primary partition contains an operating system), use FDISK (or Caspar
if it has the capability) to check that this 8 GB partition is PRIMARY
and ACTIVE [**].

     [**] Only Primary partitions are bootable. And a primary partition
          must be Active to be bootable. (Although it's possible to
          have more than one primary partition on a disk drive, it's
          best to have only one primary partition per hard drive.)

If your 8 GB primary partition isn't Active, mark it that way using
FDISK or CASPAR.


>However, on this occasion the process isn't working and I'm durned
>if I can see what's going wrong. After the copy is complete and I
>connect the new drive into the box, it begins to boot then says:


For now, forget about the following errors and do what I
suggested. Let us (or me) know if you still have any problems.


>"Verifying DMI Pool Data
>Boot from CD:
>
>A disk read error has occurred
>Use Ctrl\Alt\Delete to restart"
>
>I've repeated the cloning process several times using both Casper
>and Partition Magic 8 with the same lack of success - I even sent
>the first 120Gb drive back to the supplier, thinking it was faulty
>but the replacement does the same thing.


I use Partition Magic 8 and Drive Image 7 now. (I've switched through
18 [**] disk drives on my main computer and I've not had to reinstall
Win2K or Win98 in all that time.)

    [**] The drives didn't fail, I just upgrade them a lot. (I move
         older, slower drives to other computers whenever I buy new
         faster drives.

I've used PM dozens of times over the last seven years and never lost
any data. I've used Drive Image since version 1 and found it great.

I like the newest version of DI because it runs off the bootable
Drive Image CDROM. (And you can make spare copies of that CDROM.)
There's no need for a floppy drive [**] or an already existing DOS
or Windows installation on ny hard drive. And DI7 works over my
local network now. (I can save image files from one computer onto
other computers and restore any computer from the other computers.)

     [**] Floppy disks can go bad. And hard disk drives can become
           fail or become corrupted.

The only thing about PM and DI is that you have to really think
things out (logically) ahead of time.

Sorry for that sentence all in caps...I used them for emphasis.

Regards,
Bill

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