I have a 17 gigabyte Seagate hard drive in my primary computer at work. When I installed it, that number seemed obscenely high; who in their right mind could ever fill 17 GB? Well, I answered that question last week.

I had just over 4 GB of free space left on the disk, when a client came in with a task that required the new Visual Studio .NET. I have avoided installing .NET up to this point, just because I knew I would waste time exploring all the cool stuff in the Common Language Runtime, but when a client knocks, you answer. To my horror, the release notes say that a full installation need 3.5 GB of disk space!

So, I popped off to Fry's this weekend and got an 80 GB Western Digital "Special Edition" for $119. It has a 3-year warranty, it runs ATA-100 (my current disk is ATA-33), and it has an 8 MB buffer, which should make things go much faster. I came in Monday morning dreading the thought of Yet Another Brain Transplant, a task which Microsoft makes unnecessarily hard.

When I opened the drive, I discovered a floppy disk inside containing a set of utilities from Western Digital called "Data Lifeguard" that, among other things, includes a drive copy utility similar to Ghost that understands the NTFS format on my disk. Great, I thought; that's a lot easier than doing it the hard way!

Alas, here is the timeline for my misbegotten transplant adventure.

• 10:30 AM -- Shutdown, install disk, tweak jumpers.
• 11:00 AM -- Start WD tools and explore
• 11:15 AM -- Start disk copy
• 1:00 PM -- Disk copy hung at 96%: 10,444 of 10,855 MB copied
• 1:01 PM -- Swear a lot
• 1:10 PM -- Try it again
• 3:00 PM -- Hung again at 96%: 10,445 of 10,855 MB copied
• 3:01 PM -- Swear a lot more, use WD's name in vain
• 3:05 PM -- Remove old disk, make new disk the IDE "master", reboot
• 3:10 PM -- Install Windows 2000, tell it to format the partition
• 3:40 PM -- Format complete, start installing
• 4:00 PM -- Install complete
• 4:10 PM -- Start SECOND install of Win2K into a directory not called WINNT
• 4:40 PM -- Second install complete
• 4:41 PM -- Connect old hard disk in again, boot up new Win2K
• 4:45 PM -- Start recursive xcopy from old to new
• 6:40 PM -- Recursive xcopy complete
• 6:42 PM -- Use regedit to fix up drive-letter-to-serial-number mapping
• 6:45 PM -- Reboot into original Win2K on new disk -- SUCCESS

Now, it's true that I didn't run into any really difficult problems, and except for one stupidity on my part, I didn't lose any data. But if the WD utilities had worked, I could have been done in 2 hours instead of 9 hours.

And yes, the new drive is significantly faster: big programs, especially, load much quicker than before. Color me happy.

And why did I install TWO copies of Win2K on the empty disk? Well, the copy of Win2K on my old disk was in a directory called "\WINNT". In order to copy that to the new disk, I needed to be running Win2K on the NEW disk from a directory with some other name. Unfortunately, Win2K does not allow to you change the name of the system directory when installing to a fresh disk -- it always uses \WINNT. Thus, I had to install a second one (where you DO get a chance to give a new name), and delete the first.

The drive-letter-to-serial-number mapping is one that tripped me up before. In the Win2K registry, in \HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MountedDevices, Win2K keeps a list of the serial numbers of the disks mapped to the DOS drive letters. My old registry, of course, had the old disk listed as C:. If I hadn't changed that, when I rebooted on the new disk, C: would STILL map to the old disk, and the new disk would get assigned something bigger (turned out to be G:). The system would still boot from the new disk (now called G:), but any programs that referred to C: would go to the old disk.