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General discussion

Installing windows on a slave drive,using it for main drive

Sep 8, 2005 9:12PM PDT

I need some help, I have a Dell Dimension 4400, running windows XP. It came with a 40g harddrive, and I added a 120g slave drive listed as E, I use it for all my storage and games and such, I found that some games are mirrored on C and it is using up my space, I would like to install Windows on the 120 harddrive and use it as my main drive i'm not sure about how to do this, it is already partitioned I don't know if it will work to just install windows on it and then wipe out C or not. any help would be apprectiated

Discussion is locked

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The best way I can think
Sep 8, 2005 9:25PM PDT

is to use a disk mirroring software such as Drive Image/Ghost that creates a duplicate of your C: partition. You can alter it's size during the process. It would require that the destination drive be all free space. Once the partition is copied, you just remove the old drive and put the new one in its place. From here you can create other partitions on the larger drive if you left some of it free. You can put the small drive back in as a slave but you need to wipe it out first. You don't want to have a copy of XP duplicated on the same system and try to switch between them.

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Changing my drives
Sep 8, 2005 9:37PM PDT

thanks for the help, If I backup the important files I have on the larger drive, can I just install windows on it, It is partitioned already, then proceed with wiping out my c drive.

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mfg tool
Sep 9, 2005 12:23AM PDT

Another way:

Most HD mfg's provide a free tool to transfer the image of one drive to another. Download the tool from your new HD mfg's site.