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General discussion

Another 2nd hard drive question

Jul 15, 2005 2:18AM PDT

I'm putting a 2nd 40 gig hard drive in a new computer I have purchased. This hard drive is from my old computer that had the motherboard fry last week. This old hard drive has winxp on it and quite a few programs/files saved. What I want to do is get rid of a bunch of garbage off this drive that isn't needed.

Does this drive have to have programs such as word/excel installed on it if I save the data files there or can I delete it off the old drive and just have it on my new one? Or do each drive have to have the corresponding program installed to open it?

I guess my question is if this were you, and you were going to have all of your programs installed on the new drive, how many programs are necessary to leave on the old one?

Thanks

Discussion is locked

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Well....
Jul 15, 2005 7:16PM PDT

1) None of the programs (barring a few "special" ones that do not share the OS resources) will run from the old disk. You will have to re install them.

2) Data files can be opened by the corresponding programs where ever they are located. You can have Excel in D drive and the xls files in another drive.

What I would do is backup my data files to the first drive, and also those "special" programs.

To your last question, the answer is NONE.

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Having XP Favorites & OE Mail folders on Data drive
Jul 19, 2005 8:07AM PDT

I plan to have the primary partition holding the boot record, OS (WindowsXP Prof) and all program files and keep the data files on a second partition. Most programs allow you to select the drive,file path etc to such.
But, I can't figure how to move/maintain Internet Favorites (IE6) and Outlook Express mail folders in my "Data" partition. There must be a way to do this set up; maybe directly in the registry?

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Another 2nd hard drive
Jul 26, 2005 9:56PM PDT

I wouldn't leave any program on the old one, as it might bring about some mistakes in OS.
When I bought a new HDD, I had to transfer all information from my old HDD, because I didn't want to lose anything, I had installed windows and many needed programs. And I use hard drive cloning software. I create clone of my old HDD, make a bootable CD (it takes reasonable among of space due to highest level of compression) and restore it onto new on (in your case you may restore image from old HDD). So if you want to keep some data you may follow my example. After that be sure all you need assist at new HDD, an old one you may format - it'll remove all your ''garbage'' unambiguously.