DM800 swapping internal HDD

[Bazza]

I installed a 160gb hard disk in my DM800 and I'm looking at replacing it with a larger one. What's the easiest way of copying the old drive to the new one so that I don't lose anything?

[loveman]

If you're able to get a copy of symantec ghost (corportate editions, not the norton crap), you could put both drives inside the same machine. When you use the dos version of the ghost, it allows you to copy one drive to another...

Never tried using it on linux partitions, but maybe it'll worth it you have a copy of it available close by...

That's one reason why I try telling everyone to try getting as big a hdd as they can afford straight off... Am thinking of upgrading mine from a 320gb to 500gb, but will just wait it out a little longer maybe and see if they expand it to support anything bigger later :)

[fced]

may be also with Partition Magic or Partedmagic

_http://partedmagic.com/wiki/PartedMagic.php

[loveman]

wondering if u managed this yet, as looking to buy a 500gb hdd, so would like to swap conents over also...

[kebien]

Just move the content of the /movie folder to the PC,then swap hard drives,and send it back in.
This is what ANY program will do anyway.(programs will have to backup the drive the same way)

[loveman]

Just move the content of the /movie folder to the PC,then swap hard drives,and send it back in.
This is what ANY program will do anyway.(programs will have to backup the drive the same way)
Not strictly true... If both drives are connected to the same machine at the same time, then you could just copy one drive to the other without having to temporarily copy to a third drive... (assuming the filesystem can read both drives)

[loveman]

OK, I received my 500gb hdd the other day, and have proceeded to tranfer the data from my 320gb to it... This is what happened:

I connected both drives to one of the computers at work, and set about running symantec ghost to get the disks copying over. I got an hour through, and it told me there were 3 hours remaining, but I had to go home (end of the day), so I disconnected the drives and took them home. Got home, took the drive out of my laptop, ran knoppix live cd, and copied over the data from the old hdd over to my usb portable drive (only took just over an hour to do that, so why 5 hours for the ghost?!). I then loaded back in to my windows hdd on the laptop, and proceeded to ftp the data accross. This was painfully slow. One movie which was about 5gb took 30 mins to ftp accross. Another video, which was 500mb, took 5 mins. So I though that the ftp all 200gb accross would be too painstakingly slow.

So, I removed the hdd from the dm800, connected both up to my desktop pc, downloaded my ghost boot disk from work, and then set it running overnight while I slept. Woke up this morning, and it'd copied everything across. Took just over 7 hours (why 7 when it reckon'd 5 yesterday?!).

Anyway, haven't managed to test that they play yet, but I've installed the drive back into the dm800, and can read the files through ftp... So I'd imagine that they'll play back fine.

Nice simple way to do it. Basically, just connect both laptops to sata ports on your pc, remove all other sata connections (apart from cd/dvd drive if it's a sata drive), load up the symantec ghost boot disk, select local, drive to drive. Select the drive to copy from, then the drive to copy to, and run. Come back a few hours later, and sorted...

Bazza, if your need the boot image for ghost (it's a nero cd image), then send me a pm, and I'll send it to you...

Cheers

[Bazza]

Today I got my 500gb HDD. Out came the old 160gb one and I temporarily mounted it in a cradle. Backed it up using Acronis True Image Home 11 (running under Vista x64) and it took around 25 minutes. Swapped drives and wrote the file to the 500gb drive and it took around the same amount of time. DM800 recognised the new drive in the cradle straight away. Nice and easy.