Help with installing 2nd HD

[Taco Lover]

Hello all,

I currently have a WinXP machine that I'd like to install a 2nd HD onto. The 2nd HD is from my older Win98 machine. Wanted to add extra storage for pics and music. Anyway, I pretty much understand how to physically install the drive, and to set the drive to be a slave, but what I am wondering is this: will WinXP automatically recognize the 2nd drive? Will I have to reconfigure anything for it to work? I would rather not have to reformat the older drive as there are still files on the drive that I'd like to keep.

Assuming that the 2nd HD is recognized, can I delete the Win98 OS stuff on the drive to create more disk space?

Thanks for the help.

 

[poertner_1274]

You shouldn't have a problem. Your boot.ini will only show your XP installation so that is what it will boot to. Then Windows will see it as an extra drive with a windows directory on it, but that isn't a big deal.
If you don't plan on using that drive again I don't see why you couldn't just copy everything you need over to your XP drive and then format the whole thing as NTFS. That would be the best option.

BTW, :wave:Welcome to TechSpot:wave:

 

[Phantasm66]

Very good reply poertner, you've pretty much answered the question.

fit that 2nd HDD from the old machine into the new one, copy any wanted data off it onto the 1st HDD. Then format the 2nd.

to format it, open a command prompt and type:

format d: /q

where d: is the drive you want to format.

 

[Taco Lover]

Thanks for the info. I don't know if I'll have room on the XP drive to copy over what data I want. I guess I'll find that out. If I do have room, I'll reformat the old drive. We'll see how it goes. Thanks again!

 

[Phantasm66]

Post back and tell us how it went.

 

[Goalie]

One note- be sure to set the drive as master/slave appropriately. Having two masters can cause conflicts, and it's a tossup which drive will win (if any) on the fight to boot.

Best way is to leave your XP HD as the master, set the Win98 to secondary, and put it on the same channel (cable) as the XP Hard drive. Move devices to the secondary cable as necessary.

 

[Taco Lover]

Well, installed it on Saturday. No problems. Now I've got extra HD space for my new iPod!

Thanks again.