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General discussion

Need Quick Help, partial reinstall XP

by powertoolman Sep 4, 2007 3:18PM PDT

A year ago I added a 200 Gb drive and planned on removing the old 16 Gb drive, but for lengthy reasons (couldn't boot to CD), I was forced to make the 16 Gb Win 2K drive my boot drive even though XP resides on the 200 Gb drive. I had planned on fixing this later, which is where I am at now.

I just added a 500 Gb drive just for data, so I now have enough space to backup all of my data away from both the 16 Gb and 200 Gb drives. I also can now boot to the CD so I can properly install Win XP without needing to boot the the old Win2K drive. The 200 Gb drive will be a software drive, and the 500 Gb drive will be Data.

My question is will XP-install let me make the 200 Gb drive bootable without destroying the original installation and all of the program files already on it. I want to get rid of the 16 Gb drive because it is too old and I don't want to risk loosing everything if I can no longer boot from it. On the otherhand, some of the software will be difficult to reinstall, so I don't want to wipe out the 200Gb drive in the process.

Discussion is locked

2 Posts

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The problems I see are..

by r. proffitt Former Forum moderator Sep 4, 2007 10:32PM PDT

1. You must be able to boot from CD.

2. You must have the XP SP2 CD.

3. If those are SATA drives you'll have to get the floppy drive working or research how to slipstream those drivers.

4. Finally, the only way to save the programs is called "XP REPAIR INSTALL" which is widely documented so I will not duplicate those instructions here.

Good luck and backup what you can't lose.

Bob

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Listen, here is what I do with SATA.

by YankeesNYwins Sep 4, 2007 10:51PM PDT

Since they are so easy to change. Only plug one in at a time.

I have ubuntu on a different hard drive and any time I feel like messing with it I simply slide the side panel back and unplug one hard drive and plug in the other. Sata makes it easy. I have four hard drives I use this way to experiment with.

I can plug them all in but then I have to be careful of which one boots.

Hope this helps.

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