Want to do some rearranging . need advice

[hudson80]

I want to temporally disconnect my 500 gig SATA drive That has XP Pro and a bunch of garbage on C:\ , pictures, music, etc on D & F partitions

I want to install XP Pro on the blank formatted 250 gig SATA drive now designated U and reinstall the applications.
I’m guessing the new install would automatically make the 250 gig drive C:\

Then what would happen when I reconnected the old 500 gig drive ? What I want to do is wipe the C partition on it and use the drive for storage and back ups I have backed up every thing but windows from the C drive to an external. I feel like I’m missing something that’s going to bite me.

[sgtspector]

When you connect the 250 sata drive make sure you have no other drives connected except the optical drive(s). That includes usb devices. That will ensure that it is recognized as the c: drive. When complete reconnect the old c: drive and it will be assigned a new letter designation according to its position on the bus. All the files should then be accessible to you. Good luck,

[TwoRails]

Also, remember to correct your boot sequence in your BIOS after you pull the old one and insert the new one.

[Negeva]

If you've backed everything up why not just clone the drive? Will save you time as you won't need to re-install.

Just cloned a 120Gb drive that was partitioned into 3: [Windows C = 50Gb, Data D = 50Gb and Backup E = 17Gb] onto a nice new 500Gb drive. Only carried over the Windows partition as all data and backups are on DVD media. Acronis TrueImage was the tool used and allowed me to select the patition(s) I wanted plus whether to resize them. Took less than 30 minutes.

All that was left for me to do was create a data partition out of the remaining 450 (or so) gigs.

[hudson80]

Lots of garbage in the O/S. Various," has a problem and needs to close" message's. I do a lot of foolin around with new programs . Eventually I get tired of repairs its easier to do a reinstall, and since I want to move to another drive any way. I have, and have used Acronis.
80 years old and retired have too much time to burn up Thats how this machine gets screwed up. The wifes is XP pro and never a hiccup.

[hudson80]

The old fool is reluctantly calling for help. Did all my back ups to and external drive .
Then tried to install XP PRO to an empty 250G Seagate SATA drive which I had formatted with disk management. Booted from CD, windows copied files ok but at loading windows start would not load. Finally shut down with missing NTLDR. Reformatted with Acronis, same problem. This is new disk and Seagate tools says its OK
Decided I would clone it from the 500g disk and then try a reinstall. Cloned ok Would not get past loading the files . This on either a SATA or A IDE optical drive.
I have a Win 98 boot disk with Fdisk Thought about running that and formatting SAT temporally.
But decided to touch base with the guru’s first . I have removed and reinstalled XP many times on several computers with out all this fuss. Right I can run XP with my programs on either disk.
So I await your words of wisdom
Thank you

[glc]

Zero fill it and try the install - let the XP setup do the initial partitioning and formatting.