Installing new boot drive

[edm]

Hi all, well I currently have WINXP Pro installed on a 320 gig drive. I want to purchase and install a new 500 gig 7200.11 drive and would like to use it as the main boot drive, installing XP on it. Then keep my current drive as a slave "data" drive.

Is this possible to do without formatting my current drive? basically, I would like to keep all my files intact while wiping out windows?

thanks in advance for any help.

 

[corkyg]

Here's how I would do it. I would clone the old drive to the new drive as is. Then test the new drive. A proper clone job with TrueImage should boot right up. If that is AOK, then you can delete anything you want on the old drive and use it as a data drive.

 

[DSF]

Originally posted by: corkyg
Here's how I would do it. I would clone the old drive to the new drive as is. Then test the new drive. A proper clone job with TrueImage should boot right up. If that is AOK, then you can delete anything you want on the old drive and use it as a data drive.

This is what I would do. A trial version of TrueImage can be downloaded from the Acronis website for free.

Or, if either of the two drives is a Seagate or Maxtor, you can download DiscWizard from the Seagate website. It uses the same software as TrueImage. I think most hard drive manufacturers have such cloning utilities available.

 

[edm]

Thanks. Both drives are Seagates so I'll look into that DiscWizard.

One thing though that I forgot to mention is my current OS got messed up recently, which is why I decided to do the upgrade now. it still boots up fine, just getting some errors and some of the registry was corrupted. So I'm not sure how doing a clone would be. I guess I could do the clone as you both suggested, then once I am up and running format the new drive and do a clean install. This should work, correct?

 

[corkyg]

If you are going to do that - then what's the point of cloning or duplication?

Keep everything as it is on the old drive, and then do a format/fresh install of XP on the new drive. After that you can migrate programs to the new drive, and keep all your data files as is on the old one. Once the new drive is operational, then you can DELTREE \Windows on the old drive and have it for data only.

 

[edm]

I'm up and running with the new drive. I did what corky said and just installed the new drive by itself with a clean install of XP. I then connected the other two drives, a 320 gig (original boot drive) and a 160 drive. Once I copied all the files I needed to keep, I formatted the original boot drive (the 320 gig drive). The only problem I'm having now is, when I boot up I need to go into the boot menu and select the new drive every time or it hangs. Is there any way to fix this?

thanks again

btw, I took a look at the boot.ini and didn't see anything abnormal?

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn


EDIT: ok, looking under disk management my drive with XP is listed as partition "0", does this just mean I need to change the "1" in the boot.ini to "0"?

 

[edm]

Never mind, I figured it out. I had to go into bios and change the HD boot priority thanks again all