Your present drive has all your data. Since you have a new drive, I'd keep your present drive to one side as a spare and use the new one for your XP installation.
Step 1 - preparation.
Make a list of of all the components in your machine and go to the manufacturers sites and down load the latest/XP drivers. Make sure you have the original CD where you can't find a new one. Burn the drivers to a CD or store them on your present drive.
Step 2 - Swop the drives.
Take out your present hard drive and put it safely to one side. Set the jumper on your new drive as the Master (See comments below about Master/Slave) and insert in place of the original drive.
Step 3 - BIOS.
Reboot the machine, go into the BIOS as it boots (normally the DEL key) and get it to detect the new drive. Go to the boot order and set it to boot from the CD first. Insert the XP CD into the CD drive. Save and exit and let it reboot.
Step 4 - Installation.
Follow the XP instruction to create a partition and format the drive using NTFS. Follow the instructions. Insert the original and/or new driver CDs as requested. If not, accept the default XP driver and go to step 5.
Step 5 - Reinstallation of old drive.
Set the jumper of the old drive to Slave and add it to one of the other IDE connectors. Reboot back into BIOS again to make sure it is detected, save and exit.
Step 6 - Copy Data.
The old drive should now be present as the D drive. If you have saved new drivers for any components, go into the control panel/system/hardware manager, select the component/properties and point the system at the location of the driver on the D drive. Repeat as necessary. Reboot as required.
Step 8 - Programmes & Data.
Load all the application and other software programs you need. Copy all the files you want to keep off the old drive.
Step 9 - Reformat the Old Drive.
Go into Computer Management, select Disk Management and repartition/format the old drive in NTFS.
Master/Slave
There are 2 IDE connectors/cables in most machines. The Primary and the Secondary. As far as you are concerned, they are identical. Each cable will support two devices, a Master and a Slave.
The thing to remember is that the drive with the operating system must be the Master on one of the cables and the CD drive should be Master on the second cable. The other HDD should be the Slave on one or the other.
The reason for the above is that the system will only operate on that cable at the speed of the slowest device - and a CD drive is far slower than your HDD slowing your machine down.
Having the second HDD on the other cable may seem, therefore, a mistake, but since all the system calls are to the C (master) drive it isn't a major factor one way or the other.
You could do all the above with the old drive in place after changing the drive jumpers, but there have been a lot of cases where people have hit the wrong keys and reformated their old drives losing all their data. So it's better not to take the risk for the sake of a few minutes.
Last edited by ORAC; 14th January 2004 at 21:55.