Reinstalling Old Boot Drive

S

Sidhebaird

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Alright, call this a stupid question, but here goes:

Would it be possible to install a new, faster hard drive as a new boot drive under windows xp, and then retain the old hard drive as a secondary drive, just change its drive letter, and manually delete windows 98 off of it through windows xp? That way, one would have a new, faster boot drive running a better OS but would still retain all of the data on the old drive. This is what my parents want me to do with their computer while I'm home from college, and I'm not entirely certain whether it's possible.

-Sidhebaird
 
u could do thatexcept you would have to reinstall all of the programs on the original drive into xp because they wouldnt have their registry settings in
 
Well, I tried it, and Windows XP shows that the drive is there and "Healthy (active)" under disk management. But I can't assign it a drive letter and use it because the option to "change drive letter and paths" is grayed out. So XP technically detects the drive and partition, but I can't assign it a drive letter or make it show up in My Computer.

My computer is a 600 Mhz PIII Gateway with:
128 mb RAM
Soundblaster 16 PCI
and a Geforce 4

The old drive is a 14 gig Quantum Fireball (that's how it reads on the system) and the new one is a 40 gig 7200 rpm Maxtor. The old one has Win98se installed under FAT32, and the new one now has WinXP installed under NTFS.

Thanks for your help,
Sidhebaird
 
try formatting the drive because you will have to anyway if you only installed the programs on the old drive into 98
 
There's a large amount of data files and music on there that my parents want to save, however. But they also don't want to have to buy enough CD-Rs to burn backups of it all. *shrug* If there's no way to get it to work I guess there's no way to get it to work.

Thanks again,
Sidhebaird
 
why dont you transfer the files they want to keep onto the new drive then format it?
 
Just install XP on the 40GB, plug in the old 14GB as slave and transfer the files. Or just keep the files on the 14GB. It will show up as D or E or something. Do you really need to change it?
 

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