I have an 80GB hard drive with several 8GB partitions and also dual booting Mandrake Linux with Win XP and an OEM Windows license. My C drive is nearly full and my PC also sometimes experiences "crashes" to do with svchost. These crashes are possibly gone now (maybe due to a MS hotfix), however I would like to have a larger C drive. From looking at partition magic and acronis etc and seeing that people often have problems using them for this kind of thing, I feel inclined to reinstall XP from scratch on a second hard drive and do it gradually as I've got time.
So my idea is that I'll install a second 160GB hard drive Samsung SP1614N and use the boot facilities provided by the Mandrake boot manager to choose whether to boot into the OS on the second hard drive or on the first.
Any ideas if it's legal for me to maintain the two WinXP OS's while I establish the new one - could take me several weeks ... Will the Microsoft activation thing prevent me doing this? If I clone/expand C drive onto the second hard drive instead of reinstalling, will I have the same problem?
Any other ideas?
TIA
Graeme