Reformatting

[Confused Rick]

I am a novice with windows. I have ME installed on a 20
GB drive (C drive) that came with the Dell. Last month I
installed an 80 GB drive which got the name of E drive. I
installed XP on it. I wanted to insure that things would
go smoothly in XP before committing to it for good. I
don't know why I took so long in coming over. I love it.

Now for my dilemma. I want to get rid of ME for good. I
would also like the 80 gig to be my C drive (if not too
difficult to do).

Can I just reposition the drives in the case or must they
be reformatted to change their names?

If it is too much work getting the 80 gig to be the C
then how do I go about getting XP (with all my settings
and files) over to the 20 gig?

Please be patient, I am an expert Mac guy but have only
been delving into the Windows world over the last year.
Call me a beggining intermediate.

Rick

[René]

Ideally, all you'd have to do is swap the gray ribbon cables leading
to the drives, re-start and wait what happens.

[Steve C. Ray]

And set the Master/Slave jumpers correctly if the two drives are on the same
cable.

--
Steve C. Ray
Replace "mail" with "36db"
"René" > wrote in message
.com...
> Ideally, all you'd have to do is swap the gray ribbon cables leading
> to the drives, re-start and wait what happens.
>

[Ron Burk]

My favorite line from the Flubber movie was
when the professor says "Maybe it's as simple
as reversing the polarity!".

I guess I'm going to be surprised if you report
back that you just swapped the cables and
things worked fine. However, I don't know enough
to tell you *exactly* what will happen.

Things I would worry about:

a) I'm kinda thinking there's a master boot record (MBR)
on your 20GB that doesn't exist on your 80GB, and
that XP is going to be a little perplexed when it tries
to locate it and it isn't there.

b) I also have a vague notion that there's also a little
hidden file on the 20GB that tells MS about the
2 operating systems you've installed and where they
are at. If so, I'm dubious that Windows would automagically
go get that info from a different physical IDE device
when you swap disks.

c) I would think that in installing XP you have inevitably
many files and registry entries that contain references
to "E:<some path>", and when you suddenly make
all those things reside on C:, hilarity will ensue.

But, maybe I worry too much and XP is way incredibly
smarter about such things than any previous version of
Windows. OTOH, the last time I discovered that
I worried too much and Windows automagically did
just the right thing for me was... never.

My recommendation is painful, but not as painful as what
I think is going to happen if you just swap disks :-). Backup
any important user data, swap the disks, format them, and
reinstall everything. Or, just live with it as-is, perhaps
uninstalling as much as possible from the ME installation
to leave more free space on C:.