Downtown Memphis Blog

I’ve gone through a bunch of crap with my HDD install, due to poor planning.

The actual replacement is very straight-forward, but I was in such a hurry to get it in, I didn’t properly prepare. Hopefully this will help you avoid making the same mistakes.

First: I made the mistake of hooking it up to my EeePC and copying the files over. DON’T DO THIS. It resulted in the added headache of the drive being assigned a volume letter. When I installed it in the EeePC, it kept the drive letter assignment and made shit hard. I had to go edit the registry to change it, or else my desktop wouldn’t appear at all.

The easiest way to go about this is to have an external enclosure. They’re dirt cheap. You want a 2.5" sata enclosure, preferably one that doesn’t require AC power, and one that comes with a dual USB cable. You can find some on My Amazon Store.

You can do it without one, but it makes it a lot easier, and then you get the added bonus of having an 80GB external when you’re done. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though. First things first.

For the purpose of this article, I’m going to assume that you came off the $15 for an external enclosure.

Remove your factory HDD, as covered in a previous post, and stick it in the external enclosure. Leave it the hell alone for now.

Next you’re gonna need to format and partition your HDD, but you don’t have an Operating System yet. Get gparted from gparted.sourceforge.net, the live thumbdrive version. Download the compressed file to your desktop. Use 7zip or whatever floats your boat to extract it to your thumbdrive. Navigate to your thumbdrive and find the makeboot.bat file. Double click to execute, and you’ll get a command line window. Follow the instructions to make your thumbdrive bootable. Remember that anything on the thumbdrive will be erased in this process (other than the gparted program, obviously).

Now you’re ready to format/partition.

Stick your thumbdrive in your EeePC. Boot it up, but start hitting esc as soon as soon as you power it on. You should get a window that will let you select which drive you want to boot from. You want to boot from USB. Select it and press enter.

It should start booting gparted. You want to install it to ram, so you can remove the thumbdrive and still have it running. Follow the setup instructions for language and such.

You’ll see a bunch of command line stuff on your screen, then eventually the gparted gui. At this point you can partition your drive. I would suggest a 20gb partition for XP and a 40gb partition for Vista Ultimate SP1 full. If you’ve stripped either down either vlite or nlite, you can make your own call. I went with 30gb for vlited vista ultimate. Set up your drive however you like, just make sure the first partition has the label C and is bootable. If you want to run linux or any other OS, make a second partition of appropriate size. The other partition should be the remainder of the drive.

Format all of these drives NTFS. Hit "apply". Go get a beer, this will probably take a minute. While you’re getting drunk, gparted will be partitioning and formatting your drive. When it’s done, it will tell you that all operations are complete. Exit gparted. You’re almost done. You should now delete everything on your thumbdrive, ignore any "System File" warnings.

Now all we have to do is move all your files over, but we don’t have an operating system. Go to www.slax.org and download the thumbdrive version of Slax Linux.

This is going to sound familiar. You’ll download a compressed file, extract it to the root of your thumbdrive. Navigate to your thumbdrive. Find the "boot" folder and click on it. Find "bootinst.bat" and double click it to execute. Follow the directions to make your thumbdrive bootable, again.

Now it’s down to business. Stick the thumbdrive in your EeePC and boot it up. Again hit ESC and choose USB as your boot option. Once you get to the slax boot screen, plug in your external HDD. Let slax pick the default option (GUI) and boot up. Again you’ll see lots of command line stuff, then finally a Linux desktop. Now you can just go to system and copy your drive from your external to your C drive. After the copy is done, you should be able to shut down, remove thumbdrive, and boot up. It should load your OS normally, and you should have a lot more drive space. Congrats!