New Hard Drive Help!

[blakeas]

I just got a new Seagate 300GB hard drive. my current setup is I have a 80GB harddrive with my operating system on it plus a 150GB Maxtor drive as storage and I have them both going to a PCI controller card (Promise technology Ultra100 TX2/133 TX2 controller card). my 80GB is about to fail and I have transfered over all data to my 150GB drive. Now i want to do is replace my 80GB drive with my new 300GB drive and I want to do a fresh intall of Xp and a fresh install of the programs also - How do I go about doing this and partitioning with my current setup of my controller card? I have all the disks available...

[glc]

First off, your XP install CD must be SP1 or SP2 to be able to see all 300gb when you do the install. Otherwise, you will be limited to the first 128gb of the drive for your first partition.

Disconnect all drives and install the new drive on the card. Boot with the XP CD and have the Promise driver floppy ready, you need to press F6 when prompted to install the driver. Setup will allow you to partition and format the drive - I recommend you only set up the first partition and do the rest later using Windows Disk Management *before* you reinstall the old drives. Disk Management will allow you to change the drive letter of any drive and partition *except* the OS partition (C). Make sure you have all USB devices and card readers and any other IDE devices except optical drives disconnected when you do the install, or one of those may grab C.

[blakeas]

I have WinXP w/ SP2. thanks! when i disconnect and then connect my new hard drive with the CD in the drive will it automatically boot from the Cd-rom? Or do I need to set that up before i shut down?

[Gizmo]

Best thing to do is set the CD-ROM drive as the first boot device in the priority list. That way, the BIOS knows to look in CD-ROM drive first for something bootable on the next restart.

[Cricket]

Here's a useful web site to visit. (http://www.windowsreinstall.com/)

:) Cricket

[blakeas]

I have a long list of favorites in my Internet explorer - Instead of manually typing the new URL's in - How do I get all those favorites on the new operating system?

[tempus]

I have a long list of favorites in my Internet explorer - Instead of manually typing the new URL's in - How do I get all those favorites on the new operating system?
You can export your favorites and cookies to a floppy disk and import later to your new install.