Hard Drive Upgrade
When I bought a bigger hard drive for my system I wanted to simply copy my current hard drive onto it, and continue on with more disk space. I also wanted to use my old hard drive externally for backups. I bought a Kanguru 2.5" HDD Parallel Port external hard drive kit, which has a pass through port. I also bought DriveCopy from PowerQuest. With those two items I was able to create an exact copy of my current hard drive onto the new hard drive. When that was done I simply booted up with the new hard drive and the only thing that had changed was the amount of free space on the hard drive. I now use my old hard drive in the HDD kit for my backups using Backup Exec.
Kanguru also makes a PCMCIA 2.5" external hard drive kit. I used the parallel port kit for a couple of reasons- There was little to no doubt that I would be able to use it in DOS mode with a boot disk (it can be rather difficult to find DOS drives for the card slots). If, for some odd reason, I ever wanted to connect the drive to a desktop system, or another portable system, I would be able to so with no trouble. The parallel port connection is rather slow, but it gets the job done, and since I have my backups scheduled to run while I sleep, transfer rates are not an issue with me. There are other companies that make external hard drive kits. I chose Kanguru because they seemed to be the most popular, and they had what I wanted. Your mileage may vary.
The DOS IDE driver (ver 6.02) that came with my Kanguru kit will not recognize FAT 32 drives, or partitions bigger than 2 GB's. Keeping that in mind, here, in a nutshell, is the procedure I followed:
- Hooked up my floppy drive to the parallel port and booted up
- Created the DriveCopy boot disk using the DriveCopy CD and shutdown
- Put the floppy drive in the options bay and booted off the DriveCopy boot disk
- Got familiar with the DriveCopy program, and shutdown
- Removed the DriveCopy disk and booted up
- Created a new folder on my C drive, named Kanguru, and copied the Kanguru disk to the new folder
- Copied idehdd.exe from c:\kanguru\parallel\dos to the DriveCopy boot disk
- Added this line: device=a:\idehdd.exe, to the config.sys file on the DriveCopy boot disk, and shutdown
- Installed my old HDD in the Kanguru kit, the new HDD in the carrier, and put the new drive in my machine
- Booted off my Win 98 boot disk, used fdisk to delete all partitions on the new HDD, and shutdown
- Hooked up the Kanguru kit, and booted off the DriveCopy disk
- Copied the old HDD to the new HDD (this did take several hours (remember that I am going through the parallel port). It copies everything- partitions, master boot record, etc...
- Shutdown and disconnected the parallel kit
- Booted up with the new HDD, used it for a while to make sure that everything was OK, and shutdown
- Hooked up the Kanguru kit and booted up
- At this point I'm not sure if Windows automatically detected the new hardware, or if I had to use the
Add New Hardware option in Control Panel. Regardless- When Windows asked for the new hardware driver, I browsed to
c:\kanguru\parallel\win9x\kbide.inf and let Windows install it
- Several days later, after I was completely satisfied that the new HDD was indeed an exact copy of my old HDD, I formatted my old HDD and started using it for my backup media
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