reinstalling xp

Wavey

Hello and good morning to one and all.
I have two hdd's (80Gb and 30Gb) with XP installed on the 30Gb. I want to take Xp off this drive and install it on the 80Gb.

Does anyone know of any tutorials or step by step guides for doing this?

Or can anyone give my the first few steps in doing this as I have zero knowledge on OS's.

Cheers

gaui3d0pnbz86o

as far as i know all windows os will install on the master hdd and not the slave, so i take it the 30 is set to master (look at the jumpers in the back of the hdd)change this pin to slave and on the 80gb one change this jumper from slave to master,

close up the pc AND restart it, no os will be found on the master drive, an i dont think it looks on the slave, so just pop in the windows cd, install it again to the 80gb drive then just remove the old version of the os from the 30gb drive!

this way you avoide having to reformat and lose all your data,

however i take no responceability if any data is lost from doing this :P

Saruman

Assuming your not changing your master/slave settings etc... then in theory all you need to do is physically move the windows folder and then modify the boot.ini to reflect this... If you have no idea what i just said then dont try it. Just go with your original plan of a reinstall.

KdjaCL

use partition magic 7.

will do it easily for you.
or other partition management will do it and you will only need to reboot.

kdjac

milltown

Transferring XP from my old 20gb to my new 80gb drive. Sadly my mobo gave up the ghost during the installation and XP would not run with the new mobo (XP activation problem). I ended up doing a clean install on the new drive, probably the best option rather than copying all the old junk and registry keys etc. from the old one. Once installed though, XP would not activate for me again and I had to get on to MS and tell them I had made some h/w changes and they gave me a new key to activate with.
I don't know if you will have the same trouble just changing HD, maybe one of the more learned posters can shed more light on it for you.

KdjaCL

I found a way around the activation thing when moving HDs its not illegal and requires the original CD so i can post it

when switching HDs on 2 laptops both with XP neither worked blue screen with the 0x0000 error meaning Activation is kicking in i wanted to keep the files and get a fresh installation.

Boot using the original CD wont work with a copied cd and upgrade when it ask about installing XP.

upgrades XP resetting the Registry and keeps any files on the pc

kdjac

Wavey

Thanks for the help guys,
I think I'll try using Ghost as is sounds like the most user friendly method.