Hard Drive Woes/Magic ... Success!

Well, the title of this post says quite a bit ... herein a few details, although it will be pretty boring for anyone without some level of PC "geekness" . I've grown quite fond of my little Gateway Laptop. It's about 5 years old and it sometimes shows its age (1 GHz Pentium III w/512MB memory). But it works well and has been a consistent performer. However, one big drawback is the small (and slow) hard drive. It's only 30 GB at 4200 RPM. That's been an annoyance from time to time, but especially when working with large audio files (such as when I'm converting LP's to .mp3 or .ogg format files, first saving them as .wav). Anyway, I've long been pretty sure that I was going to have to update the drive soon and, lately, I started running out of space in the Windows partition again. Therefore, I ordered a new 100 GB PATA laptop drive and a device from Apricorn that converts the ATA interface to USB. The idea is to clone the existing hard drive to the USB (new) drive and then install the new one and carry one.

Well, so far so good ... as I started this process on Friday, August 24. And note that I both defragged (the c: partition) and ran chkdsk on the old drive before starting the cloning process (no errors detected). The trouble started when I used PartitionMagic to increase the size of the Windows partition on the newly installed (and working) drive. It came up with "Error 983" and the drive then failed to boot into Windows. Nor would it boot in SAFE mode. All I could glean from the boot error message screen (present for less than 1 second) was "UNMOUNTABLE BOOT VOLUME". Well, I spent a significant amount of time online and downloaded some utilities to diagnose the drive with but couldn't get a clear answer as to what I should do about it. Furthermore, this PC will not boot from the CD ... which is what I really needed to do so I could run Acronis and do a roundabout save/restore of the (still good and working) original drive. Finally, today, I found a place online that discussed this CD fail booting issue and there were some details to allow creation of a "BootManager" floppy. This was just what I needed. So I actually created a Windows 98 boot floppy and added the boot manager code to it. At that point I could boot up the floppy and then tell the system to boot from the CD ... problem solved! So, finally, I saved an image of the entire drive to an external drive and then restored it to the failed (non-bootable) new hard drive. In this case, I also restored the Master Boot Record/Track 0 onto c: ... lo and behold, the drive booted up! This was heady stuff for me because I'd been doing a lot of research on it all day yesterday as well (gets to be tiring).

OK, so now the new drive boots (again), but what to do about resizing the Windows partition? During the Acronis image restore process, several errors were documented by the restore utility ... even though the restore worked. But I checked another forum regarding the PartitionMagic 983 errors and finally found a clue where, surprisingly enough, one guy recommended running chkdsk via MS-DOS (command line). I had originally run it through the windows interface ... and I'm now convinced that the DOS commandline version is a more thorough test of the hard drive. At any rate, it *did* discover a Bitmap error and corrected it. After that I was able to successfully run PartitionMagic, increase the size of the windows partition and now all is well. This much speedier (7200 RPM) hard drive is a good investment as I can see many applications loading up much more quickly. It's a real pleasure ... and, yes, it brings a smile to my face.