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Question

xp reinstall question

Jan 19, 2013 11:43PM PST

my primary hard drive (WD 250gb SATA3) seems to be failing. (intermittently is seen/not seen by bios; missing system files; etc.) My backup drive (WD 500gb) has tons of space. Can I reinstall Windows XP on the backup drive and make that the primary without losing all the data I have stored there?

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: installing
Jan 20, 2013 12:00AM PST

Yes, you can. But it's easy to do it wrong and tell the installer to format the disk. So it makes a lot of sense to make a backup of that backup drive on an external hard disk.

One small point about SATA: the easy way to install of a SATA drive is to use an SP2 or SP3 install disk.

Kees

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xp reinstall question
Jan 20, 2013 12:30AM PST

Thanks for the reply. Would it be possible and helpful to first partition the backup in order to keep my backup data safe? Then install the OS to the other partition?

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Re: partition
Jan 20, 2013 12:42AM PST

Before partitioning, I would make a backup to another disk. If anything happens during such an operation, you lose all. So it's possible, but not helpful.

Kees