New hard drive install question

[powerup]

I am going to put a new 120 gig sata hard drive in. I currently am running 2 IDE hard drives a 40 gig and a 10 gig with Win XP. I want to keep the 40 gig as my back up. My question is how do I switch main hard drives? Will I be running XP on both? After I get all the data off the original drive do I just format the drive and not reinstall XP? Also since I will be usinga Sata and an IDE what do I set the jumpers for on the IDE, slave?

 

[LED]

Here' what I would do:
Turn SATA on in the BIOS...Boot up and install the SATA Drivers on the IDE XP Drive. After that Ghost the Drive to the SATA then turn off the XP IDE Drive in the BIOS.
The SATA should be the Main vein with 1 IDE working and your back up drive will not be on until/unless you need/want it.

No Jumper changes are necessary...

 

[powerup]

Well the only problem with that is I dont have Ghost. I also just built this comp so it would not be that big of a deal to reinstall.

 

[LED]

Well then you pretty much answered what you want to do. Installing the SATA Drive will require F6 ing at the XP install then adding drivers...do a fresh install and reformat the old XP OS Drive for the extra space used as backup. You want to set SATA/SCSI as your bootup drive disconnect the other drives while doing a fresh install or reformatting them when asked, of course you will lose all the data!

 

[Slogun]

You don't have to lose the data on your current drives if you install them essentially as slaves after installing/formatting your new drive with the OS.

(I say "essentially" install the IDE drives as slaves because the whole master/slave issue is no longer relevant when you set your sata drive as the boot drive in the bios.)
You can install both of your old drives if you want, set one master and one slave according to their position on the ide cable, or just set them as "cable select."
Move the data over to the new drive temporarily and then format those old drives before putting the data back on them.

 

[akira34]

You can download Ghost if you know where to look. There are other tools available that might do it for you as well (Ghost is one of, if not the, industry leaders in data cloning software). Look on majorgeeks.com and see if there's anything available that's either free or will give you long enough use time to do the job.