HD trials, tribulations, and triumphs!

At first when I loaded the image of the new 500GB drive onto my computer I was crestfallen, as the 500gb drive only showed as a 91GB HD, see below.  This was the state of my computer for the last three weeks.

But today, after three hours of monkeying around, I was greeted by the following, it was time to celebrate:

Finally, today, I graduated up to a 500GB Seagate Momentus Drive on my Dell Inspiron 6400, and let me tell you it was a pain.  First off Acronis True Image did me wrong when I burned an image of my old 100GB Seagate Momentus HD onto the new one, as it duplicated the size of my smaller HD onto the newer one.  It turns out that this is a pretty common problem on the Dell Inspiron line of laptops.  There’s a lot written about it here.

CLICK HERE!!

Posts #21 and #48 were really good, but the one that did the trick for me was post #77.

A couple of the posts are really good and worth printing out.

In essence, here’s what had to be done:

1. Use Acronis True Image (15-days for free, fully operational)
2. Swap out the drives: 4 screws–no problem
3. Zero LBA-3 with Roadkil’s Sector Editor
4. Use MHDD and run the NHPA command
5. Use HDAT2 to solve the 48-bit, 28 bit problem
6. Use Easus Partition Manager to enlarge my main partition to fill out the remainder of the drive (Free CLICK HERE!! and get the home version.
7. Celebrate.  As soon as the drive size was recovered, Holly ran to the bathroom and got some dental floss so we could celebrate with clean teeth (life is good).

I was supposed to use the back-up and restore  mode of Acronis True image, but used the disk image tool instead, and that was where I went wrong.

All that aside, take a look at the following screen shot and look closely at the numbers.

Some important numbers to consider:

1. 465.7 GB HD
2. 384.0 GB free (83%)
3. The original HD was badly fragmented, primarily due to two 8 GB thumbnail files used by ACDSee
4. 23.5 GB of fragmented files.

 

Here’s another interesting graphic: look at those numbers.  I wonder how those numbers will seem in 5-10 years.  By then a 465 GB flash drive may be commonplace, whereas in 2009, it was a pretty LARGE laptop (2.5″) HD.

I suppose I’ll defragment the new space tonight and read my book, while I’m at it.

Perhaps tomorrow, I’ll replace the hinges on the LCD and put in the new keyboard, after I download Turbotax 2008 Home & Business and calculate my optimum depreciation schedule on the new engine and rebuilt transmission on the gillnetter.