Introduction | General |
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If you want a less technical way of understanding the problem, think of the IDE bus as a single-track road down which traffic may pass in only one direction at a time. Traffic in one direction will always be held up waiting for traffic going the other way. The problem with a CD writer is that it runs at a specific speed and must receive a constant supply of new data to write at that speed. If data doesn't arrive in time, a buffer underrun occurs, the result of which is usually another drinks coaster to add to the collection.
What Nero is recommending is that you put the CD-RW and DVD drives on separate roads, so that traffic from one isn't delayed by traffic to the other drive going in the opposite direction. This would mean connecting one drive as a Slave to your hard disk, so that it is on a different data cable to the other CD drive.
How easy that is to do in practice will depend on what other drives are in your PC, where they are installed and whether the cable to the hard drive is long enough to reach one of the ought to be possible, but it isn't something we've tried or would recommend. If you've been using your computer long enough to need a bigger hard drive, then it has probably accumulated enough junk to warrant a clean reinstall. The only guaranteed way to transfer your system to the new disk would be to perform a full backup and restore it to the new drive, or to use software like Drive Image or Norton Ghost. But if you don't have either of these applications, and can't conveniently back up your full hard drive, here's a method that's worth a try.
Install the new hard drive in your computer as a Slave to the old one (we assume that D is the drive letter of your new Windows partition). Boot up, create a Windows partition on it using Fdisk and then format it as a system partition (for example, format D: /S). Then open a command prompt and use the following command to copy all your files from the C drive to the D drive:
XCOPY32 C:\*.* D:\ /E /H /K
Once all the files have been copied, remove the old hard drive and change the jumpers on the new one so that it is now the Master. You should then be able to boot up and access your system as before.
There is, unfortunately, a problem that may cause this method to fail to work. It concerns the short versions of long filenames. For example, the Program Files folder may have the short name 'progra~1'. However, if two or more files or folders have the same first six letters, the number at the end of the short version of the filename is dependent on the order in which the files are created.
Xcopy may not copy the files or folders to the new drive in the same order they were created originally. So, for example, Program Files might end up on the new drive with the short name 'progra~2'. If this occurred, the resulting difference in the short names will probably cause trouble later on.