WD5GNR rambles about microcontrollers, ham radio, electronics, the Internet, science fiction, and other oddball things.

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Welcome Well, as if I don't have enough stuff on the Web, I've decided to post an electronics-oriented "blog" to replace the defunct Al's Electronic Workshop program. What can you expect? Who knows? My random thoughts and finds on electronics, microcontrollers, ham radio, the Internet, and who knows what else? I've been blogging for awhile since the magazine I used to work for (New Architect) has a blog (the "daily") that I wrote to (along with the other editors). Where else am I on the Web? Programming and consulting Electronics Ham Radio and PIC/CPLD/FPGA Tutorial.

Al Williams
WD5GNR Rambles

Monday, April 28

Overdue Update

Been busy! In fact, I had a mother board crash last week and it took me just about a week of solid work to get it back in shape.

If you ever need to move an XP drive to another drive, try BOOTITNG. This is a share ware program and you can try it free for 30 days which is plenty of time to copy your disk, you hope!

This is a shareware program for booting from multiple partitions. You can use it for free for 30 days. Here's the trick. When you boot from the BOOTITNG floppy (or CDROM -- it will make an ISO image) it will offer to install itself into your master boot record (MBR). Press CANCEL. You don't want to use it this way (and shouldn't unless you plan to register it after 30 days -- be a good scout).

Then go into Maintenence Mode. From there you can copy a partition (wierd, you copy the partition on your C drive and then paste it onto the new drive). Then you resize the partition to use up the available space (or as much space as you want). Finally you go into the properties for the new partition and mark it active and write a standard MBR (which is not the BOOTITNG MBR).

Shut down the computer, remove the old drive and put in the new drive (setting master/slave as appropriate). Bingo. 120MB system drive in under 2 hours!

I had tried this with Western Digital's DLG 10.0 which is supposed to do it. After about 4 hours of copying the data, at the end, it would tell me I didn't have a valid NTFS volume! You'd think they'd check that BEFORE doing the 4 hour copy! The volume works fine. It was probably formatted under a Beta Win2000 and upgraded to the new NTFS, so the ID is probably funny, but XP uses it with no trouble. So much for DLG 10.0. I had e-mailed WD about the problem and still haven't had a reply. A few notes:

1) Don't boot XP with the new drive connected until you do the above. It will write a signature to the disk and then it will try to mount that disk as drive X where X was the first free drive you had at the time of that first boot.

2) Don't put the original boot drive back in until you get the above working (if at all). The drives will have the same signature and XP will get mighty confused. If you want to reinstall the old drive, wait until everything is working again. Put in the old drive and then run BOOTITNG again. On the old drive use the Maintenance menu to zero the drive's signature. When you boot XP, XP will give it a new signature and won't realize it is a drive it already knows about.

07:56