2nd hard drive

[perthguy]

Im putting in a new 80g hard drive and i want to still use the other 40g drive as a secondary storage drive. But the 40g has the xp OS on it. I'll be installing xp onto the 80g so Im guessing i have to get rid of the OS on the 40g. How do i manage this as I want to keep all the data on this drive.

[rjfvillarosa]

A quick and easy way to do this is remove the original drive and install the new drive in its place, install XP onto the new drive and you are up and running, make sure the jumper on the back of the new drive is set to MS (master) or CS (cable select) the same as the old drive.
Once you have finished the XP installation shut down your machine. Install the old hard drive, if you are using a 40wire IDE cable (all grey plugs) make sure the new drive is on the end of the cable and the old drive in the middle, the new drive should be set to master and the old drive to slave.
If you are using an 80wire IDE cable (blue, black and grey plugs) put the blue plug to the mother board, set both hard drives to cable select and then connect the black plug to the new drive and the grey plug to the old drive.
From the BIOS your machine SHOULD see the first hard drive and boot from it and you can use "disk manager" to format the old drive and get rid of the previous XP installation, if you have boot problems, restart the machine but this time go into the BIOS settings and set the boot order to boot from HDD0(hard drive zero) only on all boot items, then let the machine boot and again format the old hard drive in "disk manager"
Disk Mananger.
Start>right click "my computer">left click "manage">left click "disk management" right click on the second hard drive and select "format"

[perthguy]

yes thanks I know all this. The query really was relating to how to retain the data on the old drive but without the original OS. If I format the old drive I lose everything. Please read the question.

[Panama Red]

No easy way to remove just the XP install on the 40 gig. Guess I'd move all the files I wanted to keep over to the 80 gig temporarily. Then format the 40gig to remove everything and return the previously saved files back to the 40.

[rjfvillarosa]

As you know how to do what I posted then it would be quite simple, just transfer the data before formating the 40gig hard drive, any programs will have to be reinstalled as you cannot transfer a program because of its integration with Windows.

[Force Flow]

You *could* clone the O/S you want to keep to the other drive. After that, just wipe the origional drive.