Just waiting on delivery of a new HD anfd wanted some advice on the best way to get this baby installed with minimum hassle.

I'm currently running a 10gig with winxp installed, and want to keep this as a secondary drive with the new drive set as the main/bootable drive.
Am I right in thinking I can just install the new drive, install xp to it and then copy my programs over from the old drive?

I've no problem installing a drive on it's own, but this is the first time I've installed a second one.
Cheers for any help

You'll need to set your new drive as master, and the old drive as slave.

The programs will need to be re-installed under XP rather than copied over.

Instead of re-installing though, why not download a copy of Norton Ghost, make an image of the 10 Gig drive onto the new drive, then switch the jumpers so that the new drive is master and old is slave?

Well I was hoping to avoid re-installing anything, but it won't be too much of a hassle as I only installed XP last weekend and kept new installs to a minimum (only emule and doom 3 ).
I guess I can reinstall those and just copy over settings easily enough.

Forgot about the jumpers, but what about the ide cable? If I use a dual cable, does it matter how I connect the two drives (as long as the jumpers are set correctly ) ?

One other question that came to mind. I assume that I can run the secondary drive with no OS installed it? ie. format it once done and use it as a storage.

Drives will work fine as long as the jumpers are set correctly.

And the 2nd drive with no OS will be fine. I have three non-boot disks in my rig as storage.

Seriously, give thought to the Ghost approach.

1. Attach new drive as a slave. Format it.
2. Ghost 10GB drive onto new drive.
3. Switch jumpers to make new drive master and old drive slave
4. Format old drive.

Job done.

OK, thanks DJ.

I'll give Ghost a try and see what happens. Appreciate the help

A little late, but just a few words from me, perhaps you'll find somrthing useful.

Getting a new drive could be a convenient opportunity to have your os reinstalled, which should be done anyway from time to time. I would't reccommend trying to just copy the programs. 80% of them would not work, because they won't have the necessary registry entries. You may however try installing them onto your new drive and THEN copying the old programs OVER them. It works in most cases, as the installation is done properly and then all the settings etc are copied from the old installation.

If you decide to use Ghost, make sure the drive was copied properly, ie launch windows from your new drive and try running several programs before you format the old one.

If you have very little installed I would go for a frsh install and just copy needed shit over afterwards.

TBH tho I have never used ghost so I do not know how fast it is.

Well, as is usual with UK deliveries, I'm still waiting for it to arrive, so thanks to you all for the tips.

Hopefully it'll arrive in time for me to bother installing it tonight

The drive finally arrived (only a day late ) and I've already hit a problem.
Got it installed ok, but I'm completely lost on how to go about formatting it. It shows up in device manager, but no format option there. However, it's not listed anywhere else.
Being new to XP, I have no idea if there's any way to enable/format it easily and it's just sat idle until I manage this.

Anyone have any ideas?

Edit: scrap that, figured it out
(I hope)

2nd edit: Got the drive formatted and everything installed the way it was.
Only problem now is that windows can't format my old drive for some reason. It tries, but then at the last moment before completion spits an error at me saying it was unable to complete the format.

Really have no idea on this one, made several attempts with no success and doub;le checked the jumpers on both drives.
Any help would be greatly appreciated

Did you swap the drives and did a fresh install on the new drive?
WinXP can be a bitch sometimes and uses your old drive as boot/system because it detects it as bootable during install...

Try disconnecting the old drive. If winxp refuses to boot, that's the problem.
Then you probably have to reinstall xp without the old drive present during the install..

Btw, i don't use master/slave anymore, i prefer to set the drives as "cable select". That way, i never have to worry about jumpers anymore when moving drives.

Thanks Death, but I forgot to edit to mention I already fixed the problem

For the record, you were spot on though

Wait! I was right you say? Doesn't happen to often, i'd better celebrate with some cheap whisky

Did somebody say whiskey!!!