switching harddrives.

Hi , I have fitted a new bigger harddrive as a slave to my old pc which I gave to my son. Now my problem is ,how do I extract the master drive without wrecking things. Will the new drive have the MBR. so that it can boot. the PC. I have lots of valuable photos and downloads which:cry I would hate to lose:cry.
How do I go about this safely.
Cheers and beers:wave

 

You will need to do a backup of the stuff you want to save from the slave drive first. Then, take out the master drive, and set the slave drive to master. Next do a clean install of Windows. Then, you can restore your data to the drive.

Sorry, there's no easier way about this.

 

abekl's process will work if you want a fresh install.

If you don't care about your son having a copy of your photos etc. You could clone the whole old disk over to the new larger HD. That would give you two copies of everything. Then you could take out the old HD for safe keeping.

Todo backup should do it. Here is a guide to the disk clone option: http://www.todo-backup.com/products/features/disk-clone-guide.htm

The trick is to be absolutely certain you have the source and destination disks set correctly before you click proceed. You can always not click proceed and start over if you are unsure. Your source disk would be the old HD and the destination would be the new HD.

Once the clone is complete you would remove the old HD and set the new one to master and it should boot fine.

[It is always wise to backup important items like photos before doing any procedure. If you have room on another computer to make copies of important files I'd do that first just to have another copy for additional safety]

 

Your original hard drive can be removed anytime, it can be installed in another pc as slave and you can get to your files that way too, the operating system will no longer work unless reinstalled in a pc that has almost the exact same motherboard, as posted above you will need to make backups of things you dont want to take a chance of losing, you can reinstall the same OS onto the new hard drive if you have the disc's. ed

Sorry sach2, posted at same time. ed

 

Thanks for possible solutions so far
Is there a way to put the MBR on floppy or disc. Or create a boot disc so that when I remove the master drive and reset the slave to master , I can then" repair" the os so as to boot from the remaining drive. I can root out the bios and reconfigure the options there.
I am reticent about creating a fresh install on the bigger drive as the kid also has a lot of stuff thats important to him on it.
maybe I'm answering my own question .But can I put a new partition on the bigger drive ,put a full copy of the os on that and boot from there.
Be assured that I will backup to rw disc just in case. :hyper

 

You have to understand that the MBR is just a tiny file at the beginning of the drive describing the layout of the HD itself. It is not an OS.

My understanding so far is that you have an empty large HD set up as slave with no OS installed on it. So if you remove the old HD which contains the OS you just have a large empty drive attached to the machine. You have to put a full OS on it.

You could start with a fresh install of the OS on the new HD or if you like the way things are set up you can clone the whole HD (clone meaning copy everything, the OS and all files) onto the new HD. Then the new HD would be bootable to the copy of the OS by itself when set to master without need for the old HD to be attached.

[Is the new HD still empty? How big are the old and new HDs? Does the old hd have more than one partition?]

 

The new hd is 160gb with some files and games which J dosent want to lose .there are some apps on it too. The original hd is 40gb divided in two partitions. Both of which are almost full of fairly important stuff. It was originally my net box. I'm now running on a box which I built myself in 2002. But didnt put on net till 2010. So as you can imagine I wish to get the wee HD into that.
Hey thanks a lot for your patience. I tried partioning a windows HD once before using Partition Magic . But it wrecked the HD and after it would only work with Linnux Suse.
I can boot the 40gb from either partition .

 

:cry.Well we did it all and retrieved the HD . Then we started to ceate a fresh install when it all locked up. :cry The cooler fan and heatsink had broken an anchor point and was hanging loose inside the box:cryWhen we looked at it we realized that it was too heavy for a tower box and should only have been fitted to a flat box.:cryMoral be wary of buying pc's without looking inside the box.:cry
All was not in vain as the kid and I are going to build a better box now.
Quality time is very worth while:coolAny reccomendations as to motherboard bundles:cool