Hard Drives

[aberg]

I am adding a new harddrive to my PC and I'm just wondering a couple of things. I would like to put a clean version of windows Xp pro on the new drive and then take everything that I want to keep off the old drive and put it on the new on like all the programs that I want instead of haveing to download everything again. Then I want to erase everything off the old drive when I have everything I need off of it and keep it hooked up to my PC. If anyone can understand what I'm trying to explain here and could give me some clean directions on how to do this it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, aberg

 

[Deadguy]

You can partion your new drive say c: is your old drive.New drive would be D: and E:.Load up your stuff you want to save in E:.When you done load up your OS fresh install in D:.

IF you got a CD burner or DVD burner.Just save it to disk and reinstall on new drive.

 

[Computeradict]

Hello aberg,

I understand what you are trying to do just fine. And here is what I would do. Go ahead and put the new hard drive in and install your fresh copy of windows on it. After it is all installed and updated, connect your old hard drive back up. Leave the new hard drive as Master drive and change the jumper on the back of the old hard drive to make it slave drive. Then when you start the computer and windows boots up go to my computer. There it should have assigned the slave drive another letter like F: or G: or something along those lines. Then you just click on that drive and drag all of the files you want over to the new hard drive (Drive C: ). Once all of the files you want are off the hard drive, right click on the drive letter for that drive and click format drive. It will erase all the contents of the drive and you can then use it for storage.


Hope this was of some use to you.

 

[kboy]

I've heard that "Dragging & Dropping" files between HD's Is Ill Advised. The Data can become corrupt.

 

[Deadguy]

Dont see why. Drag and drop between hard drives and between computers on same network all the time.Maybe if you had NFTS and Fat 32 on seperate drives.

 

[kboy]

I'm not sure. I've never done it, I thought I had heard that somewhere before. Maybe it was in a dream

 

[Computeradict]

You are right kboy. Some installed programs will end up being corupt. Like installed software such as anti-virus or firewall or game, etc. Usually then the .dll file will be missing or some other files. But for music, pictures, text files, and stuff like that it will work like a charm.

 

[ekÆsine]

never heard of that before. i always use 2 windows to drag n drop, has not failed me. this is a basic feature of windows

 

[kboy]

Like I said I've never tried it. I'll have to give it a shot on the Kid's PC. I'm Going in!!

 

[Jiminy777]

Sounds like your heading to new problems. If your going for a new XP install, why not reinstall some of your programs from scratch.

I know it's very time consuming but the time investment to have a nice clean system will be well worth it. Draging over old program in a Windows environment is VERY scary.

You can do that on MACs easily but I've rarely ever tried it on a Windos OS. Simply because when a program is installed it goes all over the place (registry, windows directory, programs directory, dll's, etc...)

Hope you get what I mean... Good Luck.