Recycle your Computers & Technology with us.

How to move WIN386 from C drive to D drive

Posted By : gilbert of Katharine Gibbs School - New York on October 29, 2004

Follow us on Facebook   Follow us on Twitter   Follow us on LinkedIn

Let Data Doctors be your personal IT department today

In todays program (KTAR - Phoenix, AZ) it was mentioned that you could move WIN386 from the C drive to the D drive but you needed to do it the 'correct' way to avoid problems. Could you please give me the procedure so that I can do that. I have plenty of space to work with (34 Gig free on C and 15 Gig free on D). I am fairly proficient on computers and should be able to follow detailed instructions.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Tom

This question was answered on October 29, 2004. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.


If you would like to make an exact copy of your existing hard drive (including those elusive hidden files) to a new hard drive, you can opt to use a software solution or use an effective DOS command to achieve your goal

First, you should clean up unneeded temporary files from your drive One method is to go to Start > Find > Files or Folders type in *.tmp, and be sure Look in: is set to your hard drive (and Include subfolders is checked) and click Find Now You can select a file to delete and right click to send it to your recycle bin or you can go to Edit in the toolbar and click Select All, then right click the highlighted block to delete all unnecessary temporary files that you no longer need

Run ScanDisk (Start > Programs > Accessories > Systems Tools, select ScanDisk and follow the prompts) and then Defragment your source hard drive before you continue

If you are going to use a software solution to copy data over to a new hard drive, some programs may require you to prepare your new drive by fdisk-ing and formatting it first, other software solutions may not require any drive preparation at all

Let's assume you've bought a new, larger hard drive You can install it (with the jumpers set to the slave position) on the middle connector of your primary IDE cable with your existing hard drive that you wish to copy sitting in the master position Be sure to enter your BIOS settings and select auto detect for your hard drive components before turning on your computer

Then just follow the program directions to transfer your data over to your new hard drive

If you would like to clone your hard drive using the DOS command Xcopy, be sure the drive you've installed in the slave position as Drive D, has a primary partition and is formatted

You will need to format a used drive by opening My Computer, right click Drive D, select Format > Full and select Display summary and Copy System Files

When your drive to be copied to is formatted, close all open programs and go to Start > Run type XCOPY C:\*.* D:\ /c/h/e/k/r, click OK

A DOS window will open to your desktop and when you are queried about overwriting, simply answer "yes" each time

You are instructing the computer to copy all the files (*.*) from your filled hard drive called C to the your newly formatted hard drive called D While copying, your added instructions (/c/h/e/k/r), that are called "switches", instruct the computer to copy attributes, read-only files, all sub-directories, hidden files, system files and to ignore errors

When you've finished copying your drive over to a new drive, shut down your system Place your newly created drive in the C position, re-position the driver jumpers to "master" You can now opt to store your source drive, re-use it elsewhere, or change the jumpers to the "slave" position, format it and install it as your new, fresh drive D to add extra hard drive space to your computer system

A limitation to the DOS Xcopy command is that it can only copy over a single partitioned area from your source drive at a time

About the author

Posted by gilbert of Katharine Gibbs School - New York on October 29, 2004

Need Help with this Issue?

We help people with technology! It's what we do.
Contact or Schedule an Appointment with a location for help!