Chuck, it's simple enough to do what you want - just set your jumpers correctly and format the new drive with XP's native drive management system ; 

Control Panel\Administrative Tools\Computer Management\Disk Management.

However, your system will run much better if you transfer it to the new HDD and it's a lot easier than you might expect, provided that you're prepared to invest in some software.

Acronis Migrate Easy 6 makes it an absolute breeze to copy the entire contents of your old HDD to a new one that's been set up as a temporary slave.

Get Acronis Migrate Easy 6 if you can.  If it's no longer available, get Acronis True Image 7.  These two were separate programs until recently when Acronis merged Migrate Easy into True Image.

Actually, Acronis seem very keen to make Migrate Easy vanish, which is curious.  I had Migrate Easy 6 installed on my workshop (and guinea pig) machine, then I installed True Image 7 also.  To my surprise, it ate up Migrate Easy 6, so that all was left was True Image 7.  When I enquired, Acronis told me that this was a normal result of the True Image installation.

Ok, TI7 functions functions in much the same way, and has additional features, but I still prefer Migrate Easy 6 - it's just such an easy-to-use program.  

All you need do is set up your hardware (master and slave), install Migrate Easy 6, copy the old HDD to the new one (no need to format the new HDD) switch off on completion, remove the original HDD, make the new one the master, reboot and away you go.

And if it goes wrong - you can do it again - you still have your old drive intact.

After the restart, XP will recognise the new drive as fresh hardware and will want to reboot a final time.

What you do now with the old HDD is up to you.  If you keep it, set it as the slave, and I suggest you rename it's Windows folder to something else.  Anything, so long as it's not Windows.  And, as added insurance, rename the old drive's IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS also.  You'll have to change their properties from Read-only before you do.

Ian Porter
Computer Guys Inc.
Arrowtown
New Zealand
[log in to unmask]

The NOSPIN Group
http://freepctech.com

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Chuck Narrow 

  Subject: [PCBUILD] Hard drive installation


  I have an existing 10gb hard drive and need to upgrate. I bought a 40gb
  WD hard drive and would like to make it a slave to the 10gb hd.  I do not
  want the hassle of having to move all of my existing programs, data  etc
  to the larger drive for fear of loosing someting I negleted to move.  Is
  it a problem doing this? The transfer speed of the 40gb hd is 7200 and
  I'm sure the 5 year old 10gb hd is slower.  Does it really matter?  Do
  you have any suggestions about this that might ease the pain of this
  installation? I am running xp pro. with 215mg ram, and 1.4ghz processor.

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