WinXP files stranded on wrong HD...

[Small_Fry]

I have two hard drives, both with no jumpers on the back. One is a 4GB drive that displays as "C", and has XP files installed on it, and the other drive has 160GB, displays as "E", and has no important windows files on it. My brother took his WinXP disc back with him when he went back to college over break, and I don't have a backup of it. Many programs I install use a large chunk of the "master drive", in this case the 4GB one, for temporary files. It's getting very annoying, and I would like to reinstall XP on the 160GB drive and take C out and smash it in the driveway ....but I don't have the disc. Is there any free program that lets me copy files embedded deep in the C drive and move all of the system files to E, and running XP on E instead?

Dell GX200
Intel P3, 662 Mhz
256MB RAM
1 4GB HD with WinXP
1 160GB HD with not much
32X CD-RW

BTW, BIOS says that C is the master and E is the slave, it didn't let me change it in BIOS, i tried with jumpers, and didn't work.

[bailey]

I would suggest that you purchace your own copy of xp and do a complete reinstall on the drive you want it to be on.

[Mesaeus]

If you can backup all your important data on E: so it can be erased, you can use a hard disk cloning program like this free one to copy all Windows system files (and everything else on drive C to E:. A cloning will ensure that you can now boot from E: in XP, but since it completly overwrites the destination drive E:, you will have to copy your data somewhere else first.

[glc]

Master and slave are probably determined by the cable position. Dell uses cable select cables. All IDE hard drives have jumpers somewhere, you have to find them and verify the drives are jumpered cable select.

[Mesaeus]

Except we're talking about a P-ATA (IDE) drive and a S-ATA one. Master and Slave are not important in this particular case. IDE-0 and IDE-1 are just about always (I haven't seen a counter example yet) P-ATA drives with a Master and Slave connection for a total of four possible drives. S-ATA starts with IDE-2 up to IDE-5 or more, all with a single Master. If you don't change the bios defaults, the bios will boot from the first IDE drive which will always be a P-ATA drive if one is installed. Luckily, you can change hard drive priority to boot from the S-ATA drive.

[glc]

Except we're talking about a P-ATA (IDE) drive and a S-ATA one.

Where did he say that? A Dell GX200 doesn't have SATA, that's a Pentium 3.

[Mesaeus]

That's what you get when I'm tired I was ofcourse referring to a totally different tread. My bad