new hard drive- help!

[AmericanPsycho]

hello everyone, very rookie question but I am a novice. I just upgraded my old Quantum Fireball 10 gig harddrive to a Maxtor 80gb Drive. my question is this, i want to transfer EVERYTHING over to the Maxtor drive and give the 10gb drive to my buddy. So i want to make that 80gb drive my boot drive instead of the old 10gb one. Is there an way to do this?
here's my system specs:

AMD Tbird 1.2ghz
512mb pc133 mem
Geforce4 ti 4200
running WinXP home edition

 

[Windogg]

Two schools of thought. Once says that anytime you get a new hard drive, the best thing to do is a fresh install of your OS. The ensures that everything is up to date and any lingering problems gets cured. Its as simple as partitioning and formatting then reinstalling your OS. Then plug the old drive in and copy you important data and reinstalling your applications. I am a big believer in keeping any drive with valuable data far away from a drive you are formatting and partitioning. Too many horror stories involving the wrong drive getting wiped out. One major advantage is this method is free and only costs you your time.

Another method is to use a drive imaging software like Norton Ghost by Symantec. Ghost basically takes a raw read of the data on your drive and dumps it directly on another medium (another hard drive in your case). The works best if you are sure your current installation is stable since everything on your new drive will be 100% identical to you old system. The closest example is taking a photo negative and making a duplicate set of photo prints. Typically Ghost can be had for cheap or even given away by many OEMs with their motherboard bundles. The major advantage of Ghost is that it is fast. I've dumped 2GB of info from one drive to another in about 3 minutes.

Windogg

 

[AmericanPsycho]

Thanks for the tip Windogg. I tried doing your first suggestion, I partitioned and formatted, but when i insert the WinXP disk, after that blue setup screen (with all the files being loaded at the bottom) it says "Starting Windows" and then I get a black screen that crashes my comp. Ive tried it several times with the same effect. I used the Max Blast II software that came with the new Maxtor drive to P&F, and i kept the drive at 1 80gb partition.

So as it stands now I have this new drive sitting in my comp as an additional storage device. I really would like to just have the one drive in there. any thoughts on this?

 

[Robor]

I like to 2 drive option myself. I have a 9GB U2W SCSI drive for my OS and a few (small) programs and I have a 120GB IDE drive for storage and larger programs (games). When I have to reinstall my OS I can simply format and reload the small drive then reload all the stuff from my storage drive. Better yet, setup your primary drive the way you want it and use Ghost to dump an image of that freshly loaded system to the large storage drive.