Which drive is running your operating system (the 40gig) ?

Just want to figure out whether we can mess around with the bigger drives without worrying about loosing information.

Seeing as though the 200Gig is brand new could you open up Disk Manager and delete the partition, then recreate it and see what size it shows up at.

I will take a look through your PC's manual in the meantime.

ok. i went into partition magic dos mode and found the unpartitioned space was visible there. it was not possible to resize the partitions, only to delete and recreate them. so, having two disks with duplicate data i went through the following sequence:

1 delete partition on 160 drive in dos partition magic and create newe to full size of drive
2 reboot to windows where disk size is now fine, run chkdsk in windows partition magic, shows no errors
3 copy data from 200 drive to 160 drive
4 repeat steps 1 and 2 on 200 disk

when i came to the last pass of copying the data from 160 to 200, i got the error message 'cannot copy, path is too deep'. i got this message when i tried to get a big file off 160 drive before starting the sequence, but didn't worry about it as the file wasn't critical. it seems to mean that i cannot copy off the resized drives file by file or en masse although i can access the data fine. the maximum path depth in the data is six folders deep from the drive letter, and has never given me any hassle before...

http://codebetter.com/blogs/sahil.malik/archive/2004/08/30/23742.aspx
i went into the device manager, where i see 3 network devices. one is my modem, one is a pci network card and one is the onboard network device on the motherboard. i went into properties /advanced on my pci network device, because its the only one with an advanced tab, and turned the link speed to 100 full. hey presto, all data seems to be copying and moving fine. i'll have to test this a bit, but it all looks cool for now. very strange, as my machine hasn't been hooked up to a network over a year, and i don't see what it should have to do with data transfer between two ide devices, but then i am a mere mortal. the path is too deep looks like a many faceted world of pain judging by that thread, but then thats computing all round. at least you can shoot a horse!