HD swap question...

[Ocho Cinco]

Hey folks.

I know this is a total nOOb question , but here goes anyway.

I just bought a 36GB SATA HD that I want to put my OS on. I currently have my OS(XP home) on a 80GB WD IDE along with a 160GB WD IDE for storage of games.

Do I have to reformat the 160 and reinstall the games when I install the 36GB Raptor or can I just plug it in and install XP ?

Thanks ; Ocho...

 

[Navid]

Disconnect the 80GB and 160GB drives and connect the new 36GB drive to the motherboard.

Boot up and install XP on the new drive.
After installation is complete, reconnect the 2 old drives. Enter the BIOS and make sure that the new drive gets boot priority over the other 2.
Now, if you boot, the new XP will boot and you can see the old drives as well under newly assigned drive letters.

Go into disk manager and make sure the drive letter for your games partition is what it was before. You can change it.

Now, you should be able to run most of the games.
You may need to move the saved games folder for some of the games from your old "My Documents" folder to the new one.

By the way, this should have been posted in the OS forum.

 

[Denithor]

Do this:

Plug in the Raptor, boot up the system. Install WD Lifeguard Tools and use this software to perform a disk copy from your 80GB onto your new Raptor. Disconnect the 80GB and should then boot from the Raptor. All registry files should be intact, still pointing to your games/etc on the 160GB storage drive.

 

[Ocho Cinco]

Thanks for the replies...

Ocho

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Denithor
Do this:
Plug in the Raptor, boot up the system. Install WD Lifeguard Tools and use this software to perform a disk copy from your 80GB onto your new Raptor.

Is WD's Data Lifeguard smart enough to clone an old 80 GB partition onto a 36 GB drive?

 

[Comdrpopnfresh]

wd's software won't run in pre-boot on my computer, and is very limited in vista for some reason. If you have free space, I'd use partition magic to resize ur os partition one one that'll fit the new 36gb drive. Then copy it over. If you use partitionmagic to update all the drivelettering reference, you could continue to use the 160gb without issues- or so it is supposed to work...

if xp is oem, you'd have another bushel of issues to deal with...

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Comdrpopnfresh
if xp is oem, you'd have another bushel of issues to deal with...

He's keeping it on the same motherboard, so there should be no problem.