Adding Second Harddrive to XPS 9000 That Is Running Windows 7

No problem at all. I added two extra drives to my XPS 9000 running Win7.

Thanks for the response. I put the drive in and it is being recognized in the device manager but no where else. Could you help me out with setting this up? I thought it would load up like a new device and ask what you wanted to do.

Thanks for your answer. I followed the instructions and I am at the specify volume size.  I am not sure of what to do now.  There should be a partition on the drive, right? If so how much should I put on there? The drive is 640 mb. Brian

bsmothers

Assuming that the additional SATA hard drive is recognized in the System Setup [BIOS].

Have you partitioned, formatted and assigned a drive letter, using Windows 7 Disk Management?

Go HERE for the procedure.

 Bev.

Thats 640 gb.  Sorry.

Since this is the secondary drive I would use all of the available space in one partition. On the C:/ folks use more partitions to protect the OS or for a recovery partition. If you are like me you have enough drive letters already to keep up with. My second drive is going to be 1TB - 1.5TB and I will make it one big drive.

Jeff

I am NO guru! I think you can use Acronis True Image software to get that done. Or you might want to investigate setting the drives up in in a RAID configuration. One of which I beleive is a mirror image.  I thought you were just wanting more storage. Sorry I can't help more, but I don't want to pretend that I know more than I do.

Jeff

Thanks Jeff.  I want to basically  mirror my c: drive in case I have a melt down like I did on the 8300 and I had no backup drive. The hd didn't fry completly so I was able to retrieve all the data. Unforetunately I was no longer able to boot from the drive anymore and I lost my Office activation code somewhere and ended up having the spend $40 to get the code again (expensive dumb mistake).  So to prevent that from happening again I wanted to have another drive in case of failure. I guess that's why I was asking about the partition.

Very good advice.  Thanks for the suggestion.

Forgot to mention something on a tangent: if using a external hard drive, look at eSATA. You can get a small (physical size) "shock proof" drive similar/same as a laptop drive, and put it into a USB/eSATA enclosure. About the same size as a cell phone: relatively unobtrusive and attractive.

It might be a bit cheaper in the short run to get a standard SATA drive, and put it into an eSATA "hard drive toaster" (e.g. NexStar).

Be VERY careful about handing any hard drive that is not "shock proof", small bumps can case total data loss.

Win7 (perhaps depending on version?) has a built-in "System Image" backup capability.

It looks like a backup utility, which it is, but it can also be used to create an entire system image.

I had Windows XP machines that I set up to dual boot into Win7 Enterprise (more or less, the same as "Ultimate").

I used the Win7 Create System Image to "mirror" everything (both the Win XP and Win7 partitions) to a additional physical disk. IMPORTANT: you must create a Win7 System Recovery (boot) disk (CD or USB) to be able to restore your "mirror" image.

As a test, I then booted into DBAN (a Linux boot disk with hard drive utilities) and totally erased the WinXP/Win7 hard drive partitions.

I then booted into the Win7 recovery environment, and was able to completely restore BOTH WinXP and Win7 from the secondary/archival/backup/mirror drive.

It is possible to set up scheduled backups using the same Win7 utility. I found it to be more convenient and "clean" to create a separate partition on my backup drive for the win7 system image and backups because Win7 scatters a bunch of files/directories all over (from the partition root down) when setting up the System Image and subsequent backups.

You no longer need additional disk mirroring software, such as Ghost/TrueImage, although you may find that using them is more convenient.

correction: should have been " freezing a *MALFUNCTIONING* hard drive "