highland hippie

Hello seedy 21 I seem to have sorted out the issue of changing ip address but I still have a minor niggle on my network. I have a vista machine as a server and two other clients, one on xp home and one on xp pro. It seems that when I start the setup the xp home machine shows the network drives on the other machines as on line but the xp pro machine shows them as off line. If I synch the drives on the xp pro machine they become connected and it all works fine. I want to know if there is a setting in the xp pro setup that will automatically put the network drives on line as the system starts up. As you can imagine it is a bit of a pain to have to synch then drives each time I start the setup so any help would be great. Thanks as ever and regards HH

Hi Seedy21 I will try the suggested tonight if I get time and report back. The other two machines also use the internet for downloading data for the programs that I run in real time, would it be as well to set the same ip address for all three of the machines to connect to the internet or does this cause some kind of conflict in terms of each machine talking to other machines in the network? I am still getting to grips with networking at the moment and I have installed a switch so that I only have one lead connected to my hub, and the three machines talk to each other through the switch. Thanks for the reply regards HH

Hello All I have set up a small network at home that runs two client machines (both XP) and the server is a Vista machine (64 bit) the two clients have programs that run along side a program on the main vista machine but recently for some reason they do not connect using the machine names in the config files for the two client programs. What I have had to do is to input the IPv4 address into the config settings and then the two clients connect and run fine. The issue is the the IPV4 address changes every day I switch on the network. This means that every day I have to change the config files for the two client programs so that they connect to the server ( bit annoying) What I wanted to know is this, can I set a fixed address for the server and if so will this then still allow me to use the rest of the network without it effecting connections from other programs that need on line access from the client machines. I think I tried to set the server address once before and this stopped some of my programs from connecting to the internet. Any advice would be most welcome as ever Regards HH

Hello Seedy21 and tismehi Thanks for the replies, I just wanted to check before I went and got one. Thanks again HH

Hello All Probably a really simple answer to this but before I go and buy an 8 way switch for my home network I thought I would ask a question. I have two machines at present but am looking to get maybe two more. I run the pair I have on my BT home hub but with 4 I will run out of space (ports). I am thinking of getting an 8 way switch and setting up my network on it. What I am not sure about is if I need to connect the hub to the switch and then my other machines or do I need to connect my hub to the server machine and then the server to the switch? I see from the info on the switches that they have self learn for the addresses and I use computer names instead of IP address's on my current set up, do I need to reconfigure the network I have at present or do I just add the switch and the machines will still talk to each other? Any help would be gratfuly appreciated. Regards Highland Hippie

Hi Plastic Nev Many thanks Regards HH

Hello All Well after a bit of faffing around and a couple of clones of my original drive, I have now got a HDD twice the size of the original and it is working a treat. I am now planning to clone my drives on two other machines I have in readyness for changing the drives to SSD if possible. Many thanks for the help and advice and I wil of course chip in to help anyone else if I am able to. Great forum and great help regards HH

Hi Plastic Nev and Synapse as ever many thanks for the assistance. I am in the process of getting a drive today and if I am lucky it will come with a cady too. I will get started on things this week and report back. Hapy Bank holidays HH

Hi Plastic nev Just a quick question. I have cloned the old laptop drive to a drive that is double the size of the existing one (now 80GB) I did so with a proportional allocation of the drives so I am hoping the two existing drives (20gb each) should now occupy 40 Gb each. I have a recovery disc that I can use once the new drive is installed into the laptop. the question is this, do I run the recovery disc and then somehow install the cloned drive onto the new laptop drive or will the laptop run up to a point from the recovery disc and then prompt me to Install,Copy or Transfer the cloned drive to the new laptop drive? Having never done this before I am unaware of the way to get the cloned disc onto the new empty drive. I assume I must first also run from CMD prompt to format the new drive from disc management etc. As before many thanks for the help. Regards HH

Hi Plastic Nev I will make a recovery disc and then follow your instructions from the previous post. I need to get a drive first but once that is here I will get started. Many thanks for the help regards HH

Hi Plastic Nev Many thanks for the detailed reply. I have Avanquest perfect image 12 installed on my laptop so will be using that (I think). I am not sure how to make a boot disc, and I have not heard of the PE environment. Can I make a boot disc using my imaging software or is that what the PE environment is for? I have a good sized external drive to put the clone onto, so once I am sorted with the boot disc I plan to spend some time over the weekend organising things. One thing that is puzzling me somewhat is that my spec for the notebook says it has a 3.5 inch IDE drive in but I can only find 2.5 drives for laptops on Ebay. I will have to open it up to check but it seemed a little odd to have this size for a notebook. Presumably if it is 3.5 then I will have a bit more choice providing I can find one that is 9.5 mm thick, still I better check it first. I am very grateful for the assistance and will do a check on my drive and hopefully get back to you with a definate rather than a guess> Regards HH

Hello All I currently have a medion notebook that I have had for ages and it works a treat, I have a 40 gig drive that is partitioned into three. I am running out of room on the drive and want to replace it with something nearer to 100 or 200 gig. It is a TB-3.5 inch IDE drive and I am hoping the manufacturers will tell me the model to replace it with. What I want to do is clone the drive and save the cloned copy to an external HDD I have, and then replace the drive with the newer larger one. My machine has loads of stuff I want to keep as wll as some stuff I dont still have discs for to be able to re install. I dont think I even have the windows XP home OS disc. Can I clone the drive and then when the new one is in just copy the cloned disc from the external HDD onto the new one in the notebook. Or do I need to do something else? I am confused as to how I can operate the machine if the drive is inserted and has no data on it. I was wondering if I need to go into the notebook BIOS and adjust it so that I can load the cloned copy using the external HDD over USB. Any assistance would be very welcome and feel free to use as much detail as is necessary if it will help me to sort this out. Many thanks in advance HH

Hi Ken B Will do, sorry about that. HH

Hi Seedy 21 Apologies for the late response. I eventually settled on naming the server and the client and ensuring the software knew which was which. This seems to have resolved the issue of random IP address numbers each time I start the system. Many thanks for your help. On a slightly different topic I was wondering if you are able to advise me on an issue of changing my notebook hard drive for something larger. I am planning to clone the drive in my notebook and place the clone onto a seperate external drive. I was then going to replace the notebook drive with something larger. I was then going to install the clone onto that drive. What I am not sure of is if this is possible by just copying the external drive content onto the new hard drive once it is in the notebook, presumably this will then add the OS as well as everything else I had on the original drive? Hope that you can understand what I am asking and if you are able to offer any sage advice I would be very grateful regards HH

Hi Seedy21 My vista machine acts as server to the xp machine so that the navigation software communicates with the flight sim program running on the Vista machine. I have shered access to the other drives from either machine. The error I got was that the network could not connect to the internet as there was not a valid IP address. I have reverted back to auto selecting the address,s but I am going to try to use names instead of IP numbers. I did this in the past but for some reason it went to pot over the last month. This is what has caused me so much agro. I will re investigate later, for now it is working as it should but I will wait to see. Thanks again for the response. Regards HH