I struggled greatly to make this happen, and read alot of comments in other forums where people were having the same difficulties, so I though it worthwhile to note the steps that worked for me.
I started with a limping 60gb seagate drive and vaio xp home recovery disks. I also had acronis disk director and acronis true image home at my disposal. These are the steps I had to take to get effective use of my WD3200AAJB Caviar Blue PATA drive:
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I was able to re-install the sony recovery cd’s to the original “limping” drive.
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I backed up the complete disk image of the recovered drive to another system on my home network.
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I removed the original seagate drive and installed the new CAVIAR drive. The only way the machine would recognize the existance of a new drive at all was if I left the “cable select” jumper installed and installed the drive in the slave connector on the IDE cable.
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I then restored the saved Seagate image to the new WD PATA Caviar Drive. The system was able to boot from the new drive.
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The drive image was only 60 gB at this time, with a “false shadow” unused 528GB appearing in DIsk
Director. Windows only recognized 128 GB of disk size. I installed both Acronis packages on the new system
drive. I also created / had available boot CD disks for both both Acronis Disk Director and Acronis True Image.
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I ran Windows update up to the level of SP2. I performed incremental backups every time I updated.
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Once Windows was updated to SP2, 298GB was visible. The 528 GB “Shadow” was still present. I used
Acronis Disk Director to create a new logical drive with the unused 298 GB.
- After rebooting, the 528 GB shadow had disappeared. I did a full disk image backup again with the
new logical drive installed.
9. I then rebooted using the disk director boot disk (previous attempts to resize the other drives from the
Windows installed package failed and I had to restore a previous saved disk image and try again.) I had a goal
of resizing my main C drive to about 30 GB, and the other two logical drives evenly split at 135 GB each.
(I had read somewhere that XP might have issues with the boot drive being larger than 32 GB.) The C drive
was originally 15 GB, so I resized the D drive to about 150 GB, leaving the G drive at about 135 GB. I saved
the changes and rebooted.
- After confirming that Windows still booted and the network was still accessible, I rebooted again using Acronis
Disk Director CD. I resized the C drive to 30GB by taking 15GB from the D drive. This left me with my goal partition
sizes - 30 / 135 / 135 - 300GB reported available.
- After rebooting, I took another full drive image backup. I then allowed the next set of SP2 updates to be
installed from the network. BUT I DIDN"T INSTALL IE8 DURING THAT UPDATE! Previous attempts at installing
IE8 resulted in losing Internet access!
12. Reboot, incremental backup, and then allow Windows SP3 update. Avoid any IE upgrades, in my system even IE7 upgrades cause IE to hang while saying “connecting” to a website. Repeat the process of installing updates and
performing incremental backups until all updates were installed (as of 4/27/10.) (Note: I tried doing a Windows
system restore and the result wouldn’t boot, so be vigilant about using something like acronis image backup.)
- Voila! Install other packages (including a non-ie browser) as desired and perform a final image backup in case future updates / installs fail along the way.
