Wil this work?

[rwest]

Here's the scenario:
Dad's old P2 wants upgraded. I have the parts. He does not want the HDD formatted due to he does not have over half of the original disks that were loaded.

Current system:
Mobo P2B-VE (HP board) 100mhz FSB
550mhz slot1
512mb ram
40gig maxtor HDD
Windows XP upgrade from 98'

Parts to be added:
MOBO Soyo SY-6VCA 133mhz FSB
850EB slot 1 overclocked to 933mhz
20gig HDD
To install '98 with XP upgrade
All new parts have been tested.

What I want to do is; after I've built the pc with only the new components is to add in the original 40gig HDD as a slave. No problems here.

Now that the original 40 gig hdd has been loaded as a slave and running on the new Soyo Board with correct drivers is to remove the 20gig maxtor HDD and use the original 40gig maxtor. Will that work?

The reason for this is my dad will be confused with the the second drive. And trying to tell him the stuff that was on the 'C' Drive is now on the 'D' or 'M' I think may just send him off the deep end. And of course save my sanity.

[juppy]

So, if I'm reading this correctly, you basically just want to be able to use his old 40gig hard drive in the new system without having to uninstall/delete anything, right? If so, you don't even need the 20gig drive to set up anything to do that. Should be able to do a repair install of XP after you put the 40gig drive in the new machine. This thread tells you how to do the repair install after booting from the XP CD.
http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=151522

[rwest]

Thanks for the help. That's exactly what I'd like to do.

So as long as I'm careful and read all the warnigs and make the right choices during the repair Xp should be able to do this without problems?

My biggest concern is all the horror stories I've read about people who didn't format before replacing a major component. Is this a feature of XP or just a work around?

I'll back up as much as I can. I also understand that any time one goes inside there's potential for screw up and format. I just believe that the more I know before acting creates less risk.

[juppy]

Yeah, just follow the instructions in that link and everything should go fine. The Repair option is a feature included in Windows XP. It corrects alot of the normal problems that used to cause you to have to reinstall the operating system. It's a nice feature and much appreciated by alot of users. I don't know which "horror stories" you mean, but yeah, with moving a hard drive, if you just try to move it from one machine to another, when you try to boot up it will give you a blue error screen because the IDE controller drivers are different between the two different motherboards. With the older Win9x systems, you did what was called the "Enum trick", but with the newer NTFS-based OS's, you just do the Repair install.