Moving partitions

[HectorGomez]

I had posted this in a different section of the forums (bits & bytes -> operating systems), and am posting it here. Probably will have better luck.

I have 4 HDDs in my tower - 2 of which are still IDE drives and they're 120 and 160 GB. The other 2 are SATA and are 250GB and 500GB. One of these IDE drives has my windows partition. I was HIGHLY considering dumping the IDE drives completely and going onto a 1TB SATA instead, and consolidating the 120, 160, and 250GB drives into the 1TB one.

I have not done it, but here's what I THINK would work. If anyone has any other suggestions/thoughts on the matter, I'd appreciate the input!

1. Install the hard drive as needed to get it to be recognized
2. Boot into either the GParted CD, or a linux live CD
3. COPY the partitions from each individual drive onto the larger one
4. Physically remove the old drives which now have been copied over to the new drive
5. Boot from an XP or the Ubuntu install CD and re-write the Master Boot Record on the new large drive


I am aware that accessing data across the partitions is much slower than accessing the data across physically separate drives - these drives are fairly old and slow though, so I doubt that I'd see a big performance hit though. This isn't for a performance increase - it's to consolidate 3 drives into 1, cut back on power slightly, better airflow, and get those nasty IDE cables out of my case.

Has anyone done something like this before? I know that re-installing would be the best option, but I don't exactly have an entire day to re-install all of my applications, games, drivers, configurations, etc.

 

[gud4u]

I've been using Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2009 Suite for the last six months. For $50, you get a very comprehensive hard drive toolbox. It'll do everything on your list, and more.

It provides for Linux/DOS and Windows PE CD/DVD boot environments. Documentation is excellent. I've used it for partition create/re-size/delete/backup/restore - about every partition-management operation possible. Never a failed operation. You may find the GUI confusing at first - simply because of the large number of tools available and multiple paths to those tools.

I have not used it for multiple-OS operation (XP only).

You will pay a small access-time penalty with multiple partitions on a single drive, but those penalties are in milliseconds and probably won't even be noticeable. The access-time penalties for a multi-partition drive can also be minimized by paying attention to how much free/unused space you assign to each partition (minimize seek-span between partitions). Don't do something like, for example, create a 200GB partition that will never see more than 20GB actually used - just because you have 1TB of total space you feel you must use.

About the only tool I didn't care for (or need) is the defrag tool.

Hope this helps!

 

[MrF]

You already got responses to your questions in that other thread.
Wouldn't it be more constructive if you reply to it and state why you feel they missed your question?

Otherwise, if you think that was the incorrect forum, you can ask the mods to move the thread instead of making a copy of the same thread here..