Solved Reconfiguring hard drives

[kevvyb]

Hi

I am about to add another smaller hard drive to my system exclusively for the operating system.

Current configuration:

Disk 0 [1Tb]

Boot partition with Win7​

Data partition​

Disk 1 [1Tb]

1 partition for whole drive (mirrored copy of data partition, disk 0)​

The point of this is to have both my data disk and the copy data disk the same size to simplify back up as I reach the point where I need the space currently taken by the operating system, which gives me more time before I have to upgrade the 1TB disks. I store a lot of raw image files and have recently encoded all my CDs as MP3s and am now archiving the CDs as FLAC files as well

I want to:

1. Add the new 160GB drive as disk 0 for the operating system only
2. Move current disk 0 to disk 1
3. Move current disk 1 to disk 2

I plan to image my operating system (on current disk 0) with Macrium Reflect and hope to be able to restore that back to the new 160GB hard drive. I have been told that I can do that with with the existing drives in place which will make sure the new disk gets a different [volume] id.

The current drives are configured in IDE mode and there are two optical drives as well, one SATA the other my old IDE connected to the IDE port.

As both the current 1TB drives are the same model I am trying to work out which is which and so what SATA port they are connected too. I've extracted the serial number with Intel Storage tools so can probably do this manually (although I may have to take out the large graphics card unit to get a good look at the SATA ports on the mobo!)

Can I assume that in this BIOS screen channel 0 is disk 0 and channel 1 is disk 1 in my set up?

Can you explain the 'slave' optical drive on channel 1 to me? It's plugged into a different SATA port so why does it appear as a slave on channel 1?

When I have finished the transfer and hopefully not had to reinstall windows can I just then swap the drives in the SATA ports to make the order run as disk 0 operating system, disk 1, data, disk 2 data copy, plugging them into SATA ports 1, 2 and 3...?

Mobo diagram (SATA ports)

The other reason for this reconfiguration is that I am also going to encrypt all the drives with Truecrypt. I have experimented with this and this too is easier to manage (and I think safer) if only the operating system is on the 'system' encrypted drive and both the data drives are encrypted as standard Truecrypt volumes.

Thanks in advance for any help and advice you can give me.

 

[kevvyb]

[FONT=Trebuchet MS, Arial, Helvetic]I used Windows PE disk restore via Macrium Reflect to restore the system image back to the new drive.

Then I checked that my original windows installation was still booting. It was.

Then disconnected the other two drives and set BIOS to boot from new disk.

Got boot error so ran Fix Boot from Macrium Restore DVD to change disk id and rebuild BCD.

This got me into windows on the new drive. Success!

Then added back the other two drives one at a time.

Now have exactly the configuration I wanted.

Have now encrypted all three drives with Truecrypt [/FONT]and have the two data drives mounting on their original drive letters when the system drive is authenticated at boot.