So far the system re-installation was off to a very rocky start. I should have expected that things would go this “well.”
It looks as if what should take me about half a day to complete will, in fact, take me about two to three days. 
Looks like all that prep time was really for nothing.
Screw You!
The first problem was mounting screws for the new hard drive. I have an Antec P180 case which has special noise cancellation features like composite side panels and mechanically de-coupled drive mounts.
The screws for mounting hard drives in the lower pull-out drive bay have to be 1/2″ long because they’re threaded through vibration absorbing rubber grommets and into the hard drive screw holes. The grommets decouple the hard drive from the metal drive bay frame, stopping the drive from transferring any vibration into the case and creating noise.
1/2″ long mounting screws aren’t common hardware mounting screws for computers. You usually get the 1/4″ ones included with retail computer hardware. Thankfully, these computer screws are standard 6-32 machine screws that you can get at any hardware store. I bought a pack at Home Depot, along with No. 6 washers.
Drive? What Drive?
When I finally got the new Seagate 7200.11 terabyte drive hooked up to the #4 SATA port on my Asus P5W motherboard, it powered up normally but the BIOS wouldn’t even see it. I switched it to the #3 SATA port and the BIOS finally saw it, but now the BIOS couldn’t see one of the other hard drives in the system.
While trying to solve this problem, I did a cold boot that the computer could not recover from. It would power up, there’d be some activity for about 5 seconds, then it would shut off.
After tearing my hair out for about an hour, I found out that the D-Link multi-port USB hub was the culprit! After unplugging the USB hub’s USB cable from the computer, the computer suddenly powered up. Yeah, one of those “WTF?” moments…
Somehow the D-Link was somehow interfering with the computer’s ability to boot up since, like most contemporary motherboards, the P5W can boot from external USB devices like hard drives and flash drives. Yet the hub only has a scanner, printer and tablet/mouse plugged into it. Gah… Well, at least the computer’s not dead.
Slow Copy
After the computer’s resurrection from USB pergatory, the BIOS now suddenly recognizes all the drives on the system, including the new terabyte drive. Woo! Now we’re cooking! Or so I thought!
I’ll be re-arranging the partition configuration of the system so I couldn’t use a drive imaging program. Bulk copying files was the only way to go.
I made sure to remove the jumper that limited the Seagate’s speed to 1.5GB/s and started copying files over from the old drives over to the Seagate using FastCopy, a freeware utility that’s much faster and more reliable than Windows’ own file copy method.
Despite the improved speed afforded by FastCopy, copying a single 140GB partition took more than an hour. And I have three such partitions in my system… Ugh. At this moment, I’m copying my second partition and it’s currently 74% done with another 35 minutes to go.
I’ll have to stop operations after this partition is done and continue tomorrow morning. The computer’s in my bedroom and with the side panels off, it’s too loud (and bright) to have it running copy operations overnight. The last thing I want is to be sleep deprived while trying to handle technical problems.
All this and I haven’t even gotten to re-installing all of my required applications yet…
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