Upgrading your hard disk by creating a new HDD copy!

There are two solutions to get around this.

1. You can continue to use the old disk drive copy along with the new one.
2. You can fix this by using a disk duplication utility software that performs sector-by-sector disk drive copy from the whole contents from one hard disk to another (perhaps via another storage medium such as a DVD). TrueImage from Acronics is a well-known program that copies a drive's contents into one compressed data image file. This file can be used to later regenerate the hard disk drive copy or it onto different computers / HDD or for simple backup and repair purposes.

Replacing HDD drives with a new one is a reasonably easy task, which most PC user can do who has a basic understanding of the hardware technology inside the enclosed computer. Just closely monitor all the cable connection arrangement of the old drive and exactly map the cable connection on to the new HDD. Make sure that the parallel cables run in the right direction. The broadest cable (usually) has a red stripe on one side. Just note down which side of the hard drive the red stripe aligns, so as to install it properly in the new hard drive. Now days PC BIOS are smart enough to on the fly to auto detect the attached drives. BIOS that are older can't auto detect on boot and you need you to manually enter the settings. They then save these settings to be used every time.

Current motherboards come with two or sometimes four IDE sockets (each 40 pin). Each connector corresponds to one IDE channel, which can accommodate two IDE devices on it. Although all IDE devices have a built in controller, only one controller can be active at one time on each channel. If two devices are connected on the same IDE channel, then a controller on one of the device handles both.
The broad data cable has two connectors on it. One is for the old hard drive copy, the second one should be connected into the new hard disk. To make it work you have to resolve which controller that is working and which remains idle. Set one drive as "Master" and the other disk as "Slave" using the plastic jumper that is at the back of the drive.
The achieve a better performance you should set the faster drive as the Master, assuming the faster drive also have a better a performing controller.

Organizing the hard drive for use!

Before you start using the new hard drive it needs to be partitioned and formatted. To do this, boot up the system with a MS-DOS bootable diskette containing the FDISK program tool. At the command line type in a:fdisk and simply follow the instructions being displayed to partition the hard drive.

One can have multiple logical partitions on the disk, which in practice are addressed with different drive letters. After partition the drive you need format each and every logical partition. You type at the command line the format followed by the drive letter. For example, if C will be the letter for your new partition or drive, you type in format C:

After the formatting processing is completed your disk or partition is fully operational.

If you are changing an old disk drive with a new disk copy then you can complete the upgrade by installing the OS and other application programs, simply by running the external drive image from your old drive. This will configure every thing for you.