old hard drive as slave

[Greg]

I recently changed from an AMD based system to Intel.
With that I got a new HDD but, I want to use my old hard
drive as a slave on my new system, for storage.

Is their a way to remove WinXP Pro from my old drive and
still keep my files intact?

[R. C. White]

Hi, Greg.

Just plug it in - as slave or on the secondary connector, depending on what
other hardware (CD/DVD drives?) you are using. Then use Disk Management to
repartition and reformat it (if you like) and to reassign drive letters to
fit your new hardware configuration.

Disk Management does the things we used to need DOS for, such as FDISK and
Format. It also manages the drive letters, which we did with Device Manager
before Win2K.

To remove WinXP from that drive, just delete its "boot folder", which
probably was C:\Windows or C:\WinNT when it was the active operating system.
That gets rid of the old Registry and everything and reclaims the GBs of
disk space that the old WinXP was using.

(Many of us find it useful to have two copies of WinXP installed in a single
computer. Besides being good insurance in case our main OS has a problem,
we also can boot to the second copy if we need to do maintenance on our
original, such as a more-thorough defrag. Also, it can be a handy sandbox
to try out new software before installing it into our production system.
But that's entirely up to you, of course. If you choose to keep it, you'll
need to boot from the WinXP CD-ROM and "repair" it after you get your system
hardware reconfigured; this will let Setup add it to C:\boot.ini so you can
choose each time you reboot.)

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX

Microsoft Windows MVP

"Greg" > wrote in message
...
> I recently changed from an AMD based system to Intel.
> With that I got a new HDD but, I want to use my old hard
> drive as a slave on my new system, for storage.
>
> Is their a way to remove WinXP Pro from my old drive and
> still keep my files intact?

[Donald Link]

Copy all needed data to a folder on your new hard and reformat the slave and
then copy back. Especially if it is data. Otherwise you can use Partition
Magic to move programs.





"Greg" > wrote in message
...
> I recently changed from an AMD based system to Intel.
> With that I got a new HDD but, I want to use my old hard
> drive as a slave on my new system, for storage.
>
> Is their a way to remove WinXP Pro from my old drive and
> still keep my files intact?

[Kent W. England [MVP]]

You don't need to do anything more than install the hard disk as a
second drive and then take ownership of the data folders you want to
preserve, so that you can access the old hard drive using the new system
accounts. Then you can delete the Windows folder and any other folders
you don't need. You don't have to reformat your disk -- just fix the
permissions that may contain security IDs that are unknown on the new
system.

--
Kent W. England, Microsoft MVP for Windows



"Greg" > wrote in
message ...

> I recently changed from an AMD based system to Intel.
> With that I got a new HDD but, I want to use my old hard
> drive as a slave on my new system, for storage.
>
> Is their a way to remove WinXP Pro from my old drive and
> still keep my files intact?