Hard Drive Help

[David25]

hi,

I'm new here and I was hoping some of you guys could help me out.
I just installed a 120 GB(wd 1200jb) drive to my computer(40gb, intel p 4 2.0ghz,768mb ram)as a slave drive to store videos but i changed my mind and now i want to use it as my primary drive and get rid of the old drive. I don't want to make a mirror copy of the old drive because it was acting crappy and i read on other posts that if i mirror copy it, it would just perform the same way. So i was thinking to reinstall win xp home and start fresh but i don't know how since i have both drives connected and formatted. I have never reinstalled win xp so I have no idea how the process works. Does all the info get lost and erased during the reinstallment? In addition, how would i copy my important files such as(videos, music and sbc yahoo dsl) to the new drive. I am completly lost and any help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[thecoalman]

Try this first..... Put the xp cd in your computer and restart it to see if your computer boots off the cd into the XP installation. Hit cancel if it does and post back with your results.

It probably will but you won't have internet access at this point in the procedure so it's good to know now.

[redwudz]

Change the IDE cable hooked to the old master to your new drive and plug the slave IDE cable into your old drive. Change the jumper on the new drive to master and the old drive to slave. (Basically switch cables and jumpers.)

Go into your BIOS and change the boot to CDROM. Put in your XP disk and it should boot to it and then direct you the rest of the way. I would partition and format it as NTFS.

When you have XP all installed, copy the files you want to keep to your new drive. Then reformat the old drive and you have a new empty drive ready for your files.

Just my opinion, but I would keep the old drive as the boot drive and just reformat it and reinstall XP, then use the new drive as your video drive. 40G is more than enough for boot and unless the old drive is really slow, I doubt you will see any improvement in the speed of programs running with a different drive.

[thecoalman]

Just my opinion, but I would keep the old drive as the boot drive and just reformat it and reinstall XP, then use the new drive as your video drive. 40G is more than enough for boot and unless the old drive is really slow, I doubt you will see any improvement in the speed of programs running with a different drive.

That's a good suggestion, it's definitley the easiest. You can just copy your old personal files to the new drive before you reinstall.... BTW the reinstalling will remove everthing.

[David25]

Thanks for the replies Redwudz and thecoalman,

I think i'm going to do want Redwudz said and use the old drive to boot up and use the new one for storage. But I'm still not sure what to do first. So far i know that i need to copy my important files to the new drive. But I'm confused, do i first reinstall xp or change the connections of the ide cables for the hard drives? I was hoping one of you guy's could clarify this for me. Or i'm i leaving the hard drives connected the way they are? One thing else, i'm concerned about how my internet will function during this process. since everthing get's deleted during reinstallation, do i need to reinstall it using a cd or do i just copy the program to the new hard drive.

[thecoalman]

Leave them as they are connected.

What you going to do is copy all your personal files to the new drive. Word documents, videos, project files you may have, export your e-mail address book and favorites folder anything that you have created. Anything you want to keep has to be transferred as everthing you currently have will be lost.

You do not have to copy over program files because they will just be reinstalled from the CD's you have.

How do you connect to the internet? If it's dial up which ISP?

Also be aware that you will have to install the drivers for any devices such as video and sound cards after you install. Windows loads generic drivers for these devices that gives them basic functionality. Disconnect all external devices such as printers before you reinstall. Another thing to note is you need the registration key for windows which can be found on the windows manual or on your computer.