Two hard drives

[Margoos]

soon ill be getting my new pc as my old one died and i will want to stick my old hard drive in the new one so i can have two hard drives - one for gaming and one for music and recording and general college work - my question is this, if i put my old hard drive will i have to download any software to get it to recgnise it??? and does a menu come up when you boot to choose between the two?? also should the second hard drive be set to slave ?? is there anything else i need to know about this to get it running ??

cheers

[marcus]

Set the second one to slave, you wont need any additional software as it should be recognized by the bios, the pc will boot from the C drive so wont pick up the old OS - you are better off just leaving XP on the new PC and copying any data you have from the old drive to a temporary location (ie not on the old drive) and then formatting the thing to NTFS giving you a whole drive to use from scratch.

You may find you need to mount the drive and assign a drive letter to it after its installed, right click my computer and select Manage then disk management for this option.

[Margoos]

thank you very much marcus, the old drive is already ntfs so no need to format it and its got win XP already on, thanks again

[MikeRox]

I think he meant format it to get rid of all the (un-needed) OS files and stuff that'll still be on it, that way you'll get the full capacity out of it instead of just whats left of it.

[Margoos]

Right got my new pc and plonked the old hard drive along side the new one and it recognises it fine but what i want now is the option to choose between the two when The computer loads up so i can have one with win XP on and one with Win Me on.

Is this possible?? and how is this done?



Mark

[JRMacumber]

Don't. Just... don't. ME is a complete piece of ****, and the sooner you rid yourself of it the better off you'll be. The new PC has XP? Stick with that. Trust me, you'll be much better off. Just move the files you want to save from your old hard drive (music, pictures, pr0n, etc.) to a temporary folder on your new hard drive, and then user Disk Management to format the old one. Once it is fresh and clean, move those files back over, and you'll have plenty of space for new files and programs.

Don't try to dual boot, and don't keep ME. Trust us.

[Margoos]

i take it that ME is a bad choice then. im not fussed about keeping anything on the old drive so if i format that in windows VIA right clicking on the drive then it should do a full format??

Thanks for the advice as well

[wod]

yep right click on my computer and choose disk management and format the drive

and also format it to ntfs

[Margoos]

Right doing it now, thanks again everyone much appreciated