[Solved] Questions about adding a new drive

I am adding a new drive and want to know if this simple process will work - or if not what I need to do.

OS: Vista
Currently I have Seagate 160 GB drive with 2 partitions as follows:
C - 100.07 GB - OS and applications
D - 19.53GB - data
Unallocated - 29.45GB
Adding a new Seagate 1TB drive and want to make 4 partitions:
C - 150 GB - OS and applications
D - 200 GB - Data
E - 400 GB - Video & Music
F - 150 GB - Clone of drive C (backup)
Unallocated - 100 GB

I would like to use the Seagate DiskWizard which has pretty simple but limited directions. There are written for ATA drives. It provides simple directions for partitioning and cloning the drives and at the end states that if you want to boot from the new drive just switch the master and slave connections on the drive cable.

I will use numbers to make it easy to reference the questions.

1). With SATA, do I instead need to just switch the mobo connections for the two drives?
2). If so, will having four paritions on the new drive vs. 2 on the old create any problems with drive letters or otherwise?
3). Do I need to make any changes in BIOS?

4). Does it matter which mobo SATA slots are used for what?
No instructions were provided in the mobo manual.
I currently have the following connections (Gigabyte P35 - DSL3 mobo has 4 connectors numbered as shown)
0 - Card reader SATA connector
1 - empty
4 - HD
5 - DVD writer

5). If it does matter - can I simply change the exisitng connectors or does that mess up the drive letter assignements in Vista or require changing out any drivers?

I also have a card reader installed which assigns drive letters E to the Optical Drive and F, G, H, and I to the card reader slots.
6). Will the system automatically on reboot reassign these later letters than the hard drives or do I need to do something like temporarly disconnecting the drives to facilitate that?

7). I want to keep my OS on the old drive as a backup - as a bootable drive but not with a multi-boot option that I need to select from each time I start the system. Once I have switched the drives - do I need to change some bios settings or do something to facilitate that?

I understand that I can also use Vista to format and partition the new drive and maybe copy the old drive to it. I also have Nero 8 which I can use to make an optical copy of the old drives. If there is a easier simply process I don't mind using it either. DiskWizard seems to be powerful software but the instructions are not very good - they are written to address a lot of different options and don't have a simple straightforward set of instructions for this specific process.

All help will be greatly appreciated.

EUREKA! WE HAVE LIFTOFF! THE EAGLE HAS LANDED! (How's that for mixed metaphors?)

Just expressing my glee at completing the project - and I could not have done it without your detailed directions. Thank you. I truly appreciate all the time you devoted to writing them.

I did run into some difficulties, and some simplefications.

The first small issue was that my 1 TB drive only had 931.5 MB of space to allocate. Not a biggie - I doubt I will use it all in anyway.

The bigger difficulty was that DiskWizard would only copy the entire drive, not individual partitions. So it wanted to copy the C & D drives at the same time, which would in itself not have been a problem except that it wanted to place the entire then unallocated block of 580 MB between the two drives - at least that is what their diagram showed and I assume that mapped the physcial drive. I guess it makes sense as it is then easy to allocate the contiguous space to either drive, however I was concerned that it would place my D drive on the slower interior space on trhe drive. Also I did not want the to be E and F drives in between the two - a little anal I guess. But I tried finding a way to initially copy only the C drive both in the software and instructions to no avail.

So decided to see if I could use Vista Disk Management to set up the new drive with the intent of using other software to then copy the drive. However I could not figure out how I would then change the drive letter of the new drive to C - Disk Management would not permit changing. Luckily I learned this by only testing what happened when I tried to change it (with no intent to complete the operation - just to see what happened when I clicked on C to change it - before initializing the new drive. So I swallowed my analness (yuck - how is that for a mixed metaphor, too?) and went back and used DiskWizard - which other than that small problem was easy, effective, and quick. So now I believe that on the physical drive the layout goes C - E - F - D, but off course they show up in alphabetical order on Windows Explorer. And, except for all the lost time, doing the two together was easier than doing them one at a time.

With the two new drives set up, I took a moment to run a quick performance test using PCPitStop. One reason for adding the new drive was the poor performance of my old one. When I built the system a year ago, I installed a new but older model Seagate 160 GB drive - 7200.7. While it did not measure up to the new ones on straight read and write tests, it did outperform most new ones on the Workstation I/O benchmark, which I thought to be the best overall measure of performance for general applications. Back then THG and others did seem to run test on drives with real application benchmarks like they do now. Anyway, the PCPitStop test showed only 24 MB/s performance. I got a little higher in some SiSandra tests - but it was still very low. I was not sure if this was because of the model, a defective drive, or being installed on the third SATA connector. Anyway, I am happy to report the new drive scored 95 MB/s on the same test. I will test it further later.


Another simplification was that I wanted the remaining drives to have the order - Optical, old drives C & D, and then the 4 drives associated with the card reader, rather then the two old drives last. So after I renamed the old drives and set up the two other partitions for the new ones, using Disk Management, only the optical drive had to be added before the new old drive numbers. So I did not disconnect the old drives but just went ahead and reinstalled the optical drive and it picked up the correct letter - G. Then I only had to reintall the card reader and everything was hunky dory.

Also I have not copied the new C drive to its backup location on the new drive - it was just easier to use Disk Management to set up the new drive and I will copy it over later with other software.

Just FYI - The card reader is connected to the mobo by 2 usb cables and the SATA line (for the eSATA port). In Device Manager, it shows up under Hard Drives as four separate drives - as USB devices. The SATA does not show up anywhere, I presume because no device was attached to it.

You had asked what happened to SATA channels 2 and 3. Beats me. In the BIOS, it shows up as IDE channels 0 to 3. The 0,1, 3 and 4 I reported before is how it is listed in the mobo manual.

I appreciate your comments about not being able to boot directly to the old drive or the partition on the new drive, I knew it would present issues. Hopefully I will be able to simply clone it back to drive C, even if I have to put it temporarily in another system to do that. And now I cannot boot to the last partition on the new drive anyway, as I learned that only 3 primary drives (bootable) are allowed on a drive. Since it was the last I installed I had to make it an unbootable logical drive. I guess I could have gone back and removed the old drive - or simply changed the partition space and how I used it - but I decided it was not worth the effort. Afterall, I have owned 6 PCs for over 20 years and never had a major issue with the OS that could not be fixed with a repair.

Again, I thank you for all your help.