New 160Gig hard drive

[THEOldMan]

WINDOWS XP SP1. Pentium III 550Mhrz. 512Megs RAM. My present primary
hard drive is a 13.6 Gig. I had a secondary 4gig that error messages
said was fixing to die. So I went to OD to get a 80Gig Maxtor. They
had a special on a 160Gig Maxtor for the same price.

I really don't want to have to reinstall XP and the other programs I
have on my present primary and I don't want to lose my e-mail,
favorite places, etc.

The Maxtor comes with the Max Blast III program. But I'm leaning
towards keeping my present primary as primary and making the new
160Gig the secondary.

The present primary is FAT32.

1 - Should I convert the present to NTSF or leave it as is?
2 - If I leave it should I make the new one FAT32 or go to NTSF with
it? Wouldn't it be better to have both the same?
3 - Both hard drives are Ultra ATA and 7200.

Thanks in advance for all the good information and suggestions I am
going to receive.

Don

 

[Michael Stevens]

WINDOWS XP SP1. Pentium III 550Mhrz. 512Megs RAM. My present primary
hard drive is a 13.6 Gig. I had a secondary 4gig that error messages
said was fixing to die. So I went to OD to get a 80Gig Maxtor. They
had a special on a 160Gig Maxtor for the same price.

I really don't want to have to reinstall XP and the other programs I
have on my present primary and I don't want to lose my e-mail,
favorite places, etc.

The Maxtor comes with the Max Blast III program. But I'm leaning
towards keeping my present primary as primary and making the new
160Gig the secondary.

The present primary is FAT32.

1 - Should I convert the present to NTSF or leave it as is?
2 - If I leave it should I make the new one FAT32 or go to NTSF with
it? Wouldn't it be better to have both the same?
3 - Both hard drives are Ultra ATA and 7200.

Thanks in advance for all the good information and suggestions I am
going to receive.

Don

Before doing anything, make sure your motherboard bios will handle a drive
that size.
If you are only running XP, then there is no real reason not to use NTFS.
What I would do in this situation.
Install the new drive as a slave drive, and break it up into a few smaller
partitions. At least one of the partitions should be as large as the current
space used by the XP partition and a couple gigs larger. If you want to do
large video files, you could make the rest your second partition. If you
want to have more partition, I suggest 30 to 40 gig as a workable size.
You can partition the drive from XP Disk Management. You can learn more
about Disk Management from Start> Help and Support.
After partitioning the new drive, you can use imaging software to CLONE the
current XP drive to the partition creted for it on the new drive.
Post back for more help if necessary.
Click on or copy and paste the link below into your web browser address bar.
BootIT NG from Terabyte
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/
Image for Windows and DOS
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/imagew.html
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/downloads/image.zip
Drive Image from Power Quest
http://www.powerquest.com/
Symantec Ghost.
http://www.symantec.com/servsupp.html
Maxblast II Plus
http://tinyurl.com/275m
Western Digital
http://support.wdc.com/download/#dlgtools
Casper XP
http://www.fssdev.com/
--

Michael Stevens MS-MVP XP
(e-mail address removed)
http://michaelstevenstech.com
For a better newsgroup experience. Setup a newsreader.
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[Michal Kawecki]

This will be necessary, too:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;303013

M.