I recently upgraded the hard drive in my Dell Dimension E210. It came with an 80Gb hard drive and it has served me well for the past 3-1/2 years. However, as I’ve been doing more with audio, especially for the Mindful Worship web site, I’ve been filling it up. I was in a meeting and received a warning that I was down to 15.5Mb! Ouch! It was time to upgrade the hard drive.

I chose a 500Gb Seagate Barracuda 3.5” Internal SATA hard drive. This ought to last a while!

I installed it in my open drive bay and wired it up. No problems there. I did have to change a BIOS setting so the computer would recognize it.

I installed the Seagate DiscWizard software and followed the instructions to clone my old hard drive to the new one. I confirmed that all the data seemed to have copied over properly then I switched their places and rebooted from the new hard drive. It seemed to take it forever to boot up! I was able to see the Windows log-in page relatively quickly, but it took about 45-minutes for all my programs to load and for the computer to stop accessing the hard drive.

This wasn’t acceptable, but I didn’t know what to do at this point. I hoped it would improve.

Every night, my computer seemed to lock up too and was totally unresponsive. So, for a few mornings, I waited patiently while it booted and all my programs loaded. I couldn’t seem to figure out what was slowing down the hard drive.

The last thing I had installed was the Seagate DiscWizard program. I didn’t really need it any more, so I decided to uninstall it and see if things improved. My boot times did improve greatly. It seemed to take only about 15-minutes to boot, load all my startup programs, and quit accessing the hard drive. This still wasn’t ideal, but a significant improvement none-the-less.

Then I noticed that every morning I had a blue screen of death (BSOD). So it wasn’t just locking up, now I could see an error. It said, BAD_POOL HEADER. I hadn’t heard of this before and didn’t see a whole lot about it in searches that was very helpful.

Then after a few days of this, I noticed that my Mozy backup hadn’t backed up in 8 days. That was how long it had been since I had installed the new hard drive. I figured that it must have been trying to back up in the middle of the night and was having trouble with the new drive and so it was crashing.

A few searches turned up some instructions which I wasn’t totally comfortable with, but i figured that I didn’t have much to lose. I could always go back to my old hard drive if I needed to and use the new one as additional storage only. Those posts indicated that when you upgrade a hard drive and clone it that things get mixed up with the Volume Shadow Copy service. Here were the steps that I went through to fix it:

1. Go to device manager
2. Click "View" and select "show hidden devices"
3. Scroll down to "storage volumes"
4. Click on the "+" to expand
5. Click on each one listed and right click and uninstall. Say no to reboot requests.
6. Reboot
7. When windows comes back up it will reinstall the hardware you uninstalled and ask you to reboot.
8. Now the storage volumes are installed correctly. My guess is that they changed to reflect the new drive configuration.

This not only fixed my problems with the Mozy backup, it also eliminated my blue screen crashes at night, and improved my boot time dramatically. It now takes about 5-minutes from pressing the on button until I’m logged in, all programs are loaded, and the computer has quit accessing the hard drive. I think 5-minutes is about where I was with my old drive, and I very rarely turn my computer off, so this is no problem. I’m back in business with a bigger hard drive that is working great for me!

I hope this post might help someone. Good luck!