Hands on: Adding extra storage to your PC

When I bought my first desktop PC, 16 years ago, it came with a generous 65MB hard disk. When I eventually outgrew this, I paid about £200 for a whopping 200MB drive. This was followed in turn by a colossal 500MB drive and then a truly awesome 1.7GB – each upgrade costing a further £200.

At the time, it seemed as though there was an economic maxim dictating that the cost of an adequate hard disk always be £200. But fast-forwarding to this year, a 160GB drive can be yours for about £50.

According to UK Government statistics, this represents pay for five hours’ work, on average. But dealing with a failed drive, reinstalling Windows, applications and service packs will take a lot longer than five hours. So, if a hard disk starts to misbehave, it makes economic sense to replace it as soon as possible.

Back in the days of Fat file system, the file fragments recovered by Scandisk as ‘lost clusters’ with the .CHK extension, were largely useless. You might have been able to recover sections of text, if you were lucky, but that was about it.

Formatting a drive
Under XP and NTFS, things have improved greatly – as I found when my disk began to misbehave. Having run the disk-checking utility from the disk properties, I found it had recovered a number of folders and their contents – including my Quick Launch Toolbar, which had mysteriously disappeared. However, this doggy disk had had its one bite, and I bought a replacement.

The first step was to back up all my data, profiles and so on – I was lucky enough to have access to a USB external drive for this. The next step was to check all four partitions on the old drive for errors. When this was done, Windows informed me that drive D and drive E were not formatted – would I like to format them now?

As just an hour or so earlier I had been using Microsoft Word, installed on drive D, to edit a document stored on drive E, this came as something of a surprise. Then Windows Desktop Search joined in the fun.

It was, presumably, trying to update its index of files on partitions that it could no longer access, and it flashed up a series of messages saying it couldn’t cope and would shut down.

But it didn’t shut down – it just went on generating more error messages, which covered most of the screen. There were 30-odd instances of the Windows Search process running in Task Manager, but after some fairly athletic fingerwork to end these, I was able to regain control.

There is also a command-line disk checker – rather confusingly, it’s named chkdsk, which is the same as the Dos utility that was replaced by Scandisk in Windows 95. And, to cut a long story short, this recovered drives D and E. So, I was anxious to install the new hard disk before any more organic fertiliser hit the ventilation system.

Installing a disk
The first step was to close down and unplug the computer, open the case and fit the new disk into a vacant bay. Next, it needed to be connected as a ‘slave’.

You should find that the cable connecting the existing hard disk to the motherboard has two connectors at the drive end – the one at the end is the ‘master’ and the other the ‘slave’. Both drives should have their jumpers set to CS (cable select). If that doesn’t work you can set each drive’s jumper to master or slave manually. You’ll also need a spare power connector.

Having connected the new drive and booted up, there are several ways in which you can transfer the contents of the old disk to the new. My first attempt was with Paragon Drive Copy. However, this still reported my E drive partition as unformatted.

So, instead I downloaded a copy of the Acronis Migrate Easy trial. It really couldn’t be easier – I had the choice of copying all the partitions proportionally to the total size of the old and new disks, or of specifying sizes.

Having done that I let it get on with the job. When it had finished, I unplugged the PC, opened the box, made the new disk the master, removed the old one, and that was it.