Disk Space Fan to the rescue.  As you can see in the screen shot my hard drive is represented by different sized pieces: the bigger the piece the more space it’s taking.  Colour coding takes out some of the guesswork and then hovering over each piece gives more information.  Right click and you can open the folder, check properties or delete if you’re feeling especially confident.  Well worth the 2.5 MB installation!

I have two partitions on my hard drive: one Windows XP Professional and one Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit.  I hardly use the XP install anymore since Vista has worked out it’s kinks, or enough so it doesn’t bother me.

I hooked up the new drive and booted Drive Image from it’s two 3.5″ floppies: this program is ancient and works great, but not this time with my Vista 64 bit partition.  A trip to Download Squad provided a list of options: I tried XXClone and Shadow Copy but they were dead ends.  PING and Gparted weren’t able to work for me either.

Since both drives were Seagate models I downloaded Seagate DiscWizard and used that to copy: it’s actually from Acronis and it did copy the contents without any errors but I couldn’t boot either OS so now I was worse off then before I started.

Since I was running Windows Home Server I decided to do a system restore to my new hard drive.  I found the System Restore disk and booted from it (initial boot is agonizingly slow) but it didn’t like my Vista 64 bit partition either: I realized WHS didn’t support it until it’s Power Pack 1 release.  I went to another PC and burned a System Restore Power Pack 1 CD and then rebooted.

It got a little funny here.  WHS wouldn’t restore to a blank disk: it needs to have partitions already there so it provides the option to launch Disk Management which is nice and handy.  I launched Disk Management and my PC crashed to a Blue Screen Of Death with the irq_not_less_than_equal error.  Rebooting and trying again gave the same issue.

I booted from Gparted and created the two partitions I wanted: one 114 GB and one 356 GB (that pesky 1 GB=how many bytes).  Booting back to System Restore it saw both partitions and restored them.  I was then able to finally have my old system on the new hard drive.  And it only took five hours!

Lessons learned: Vista 64 bit is new and so I need to work with what supports it and not try and rely on old ways and old utilities.  Windows Home Server and it’s system restore worked very well once I worked around it’s problems.  I didn’t plan ahead and could have been caught in a real bind but I had an additional PC to burn CDs with and get what I needed to my ailing system.

For products purchased on or after January 3, 2009, the limited warranty period for consumer electronics, notebook and personal storage bare drives sold to Seagate Authorized Distributors will be changed from 5 to 3 years. Seagate believes that the new warranty period and terms better reflect current industry standards.

Seagate enterprise drives and Seagate and Maxtor external retail products that have 5-year warranty periods will not be affected by this change.

The important item here is that the 3.5″ units are designed to remain stationary while the 2.5″ units are designed to be mobile.  It’s this alone that should be the biggest determining factor when purchasing: is the external drive to be moved ever.  If it will never move then get the cheaper, larger capacity unit that utilizes a 3.5″ desktop hard drive.  If at any point the drive is to be moved (weekly backups, extending laptop storage, what have you) then get the portable unit that utilizes a laptop 2.5″ hard drive.

Mobile or laptop hard drives are designed to move the write heads off the platter if it detects a sudden drop or rapid movement.  They’re designed to be moved and tussled about so it can handle being in your briefcase for the week.

Contrast that to the desktop hard drive, which is designed to be stationary and only work that way.  If you’re feeling scientific and dangerously carefree start copying a file to your external 3.5″ unit and then push it over: you’ll end up with most likely a dead drive.  I remember using the PARK command in DOS when powering off a PC but it’s not available in XP…

Atola Technology