Before anyone panics, the new machine is running great.
So... after getting the new machine put together I decided to clean up my laptop. That also went great.
Then I decided since I had a 160 and a 200 Gig HD in my old machine (both Seagates) and they were both limited to 127 Gigs so Win98 defrag would run on them, I'd swap them into the new machine as storage drives and install a 120 and a 60 Gig I had lying around (both Western Digitals). This was supposed to be a quick and easy swap-over but, I tried doing a disc image to move my OS and everything else 3 times with failures each time. I tried with both the Seagate and the WD software.
After the third try, every time I wanted to boot the machine it wanted to run scan disc with surface scan and I couldn't find where the issue was regarding the surface scan part. So, I booted up, escaped past the scan-disc and ran it with surface scan from within windows (25 hours). It detected and repaired some problems with the 60 Gig drive but when I re-booted it wanted to run scan-disc with surface scan again.
By now I had the 200 Gig drive in the new machine and working good, so I decided I'd slap the 60 in the new machine, copy over the files that I wanted (almost 60 Gigs worth), totally re-format the 120 with Win98 for the old machine, put the 160 in the new machine and format for storage, then add the 60 with the data I wanted to the old machine as a slave.
I got the 120 formatted and the OS plus a few other things re-installed and got the 160 into the new machine and formatted for storage. Then I put the 60 in the old machine and windows wouldn't recognize it, even though the BIOS did. So, I thought, it must be a formatting difference between XP and 98 causing this issue, so I tried to re-format the 60 with the WD software but it didn't recognize either drive (nor did windows or the BIOS now). I unplugged the 60 and it booted with the newly formatted 120, then I re-installed the 60 and everything was recognized but the 60 wasn't readable so I re-formatted the 60 thinking I'd network the machines to transfer data.
So, everything in place, formatted and recognized, I opened the network. 60 Gigs was estimated at ~26 hours to transfer. That was too slow for me but I had a full spindle of CD-ROM's that I got for X-mas a couple of years ago, so I started transferring via CD-ROM, 700 Mb at a time. Of course, when you drag the files off the ROM they are all read only and need to be re-formatted. I got 3 discs worth moved then gave up for the weekend.
Tonight, as I went to shut down the machine, I thought I'd look at how much disc space was in use. Now my 120 Gig boot drive says I only have 1 Gig installed and 1 Gig free! Looks like a re-format/start-over (again).
This is turning into the HD swap from hell. Any suggestions on recognizing the rest of the boot drive or on moving that 60 Gigs of stuff?
