new hard drive

[AmarSingh]

ok..heres what I want to do.....let me know if it will work.

I have a 34 gig hard drive with 7gb free (FAT32). Im gonna buy a 60gb seagate next week which i want to be my primary and ONLY hard drive. Im gonna sell the 34 gig to my friend.

Im not sure if this will work, so please point out what looks wrong with this.

First im gonna covert my current drive to NTFS. Then I'm going to install the new drive (unformated or partitioned) with the jumper settings set for master and change the jumper settings on the old drive to slave. Then I want to boot from my winXP install cd, format and partition the drive into two 30gb NTFS partitions. Then I want to do a clean install of XP on one of these partitions. I want to be able to boot into windows xp from the new hard drive and transfer all my files (not programs) to the new drive. Will xp see the old drive? Will it automatically boot from the master drive or will i have to tell it somewhere? Then i'm gonna format my old drive and sell it to my friend.

Will this work as i have outlined? Are there usually any problems converting file systems? I will back up my critical data, but i dont really want to backup everything unless i really have to.

 

[Lonman]

Sure. I'd leave it unhooked (your current drive) until your finished with your install though. Then plug er in and move your stuff. No real need to convert to NTFS, but either way is fine.

 

[AmarSingh]

i was only gonna covert to ntfs cuz I thought that windows xp on a ntfs partition couldnt see fat32 partitions. Is this not true?

 

[Lonman]

no, it will see any partition. I've got a 45 gig hard drive in three partitions. 2 fat32's and 1 ntfs. It's Win95 and 98 that can't see NTFS is all.

 

[AmarSingh]

oh.....i guess i had it backwards then......thanks a lot

 

[AmarSingh]

dont mean to harp on this...but im justt double checking since ive never done this before. after the upgrade, when i plug my old drive in as slave...windows will just recognize it and it will know to boot from the master slave right?? In this case...i dont really need to backup my data first since im not changing anything on the old drive right??

 

[Lonman]

Yeah that's correct. As long as you have the jumpers right you should have no problem at all. A backup isn't a bad thing, but, and I'm only saying what I would do, i wouldn't worry about backing up. In effect, your backup is now your old hard drive.

 

[AmarSingh]

thanks again