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That's the simplest way at this point in time - parallel
connections were possible ten years ago IIRC... But those
enclosures are cheap. Just make sure you get an IDE not SATA and
that it will handle a laptop drive. You may need connector
adapters or a special "laptop drive" external enclosure - if
there is such a thing. At worst, just a power supply of some
kind (careful - you don't want to blow up the drive ;-) and the
right cable.
Put in the new drive and using a boot CD which allows you to do
DOS stuff, wipe, f-disk and format the drive into several
partitions - I would suggest about 8 of varying sizes, maybe 10-
15 GBs for C. Then, using a multi-boot utility, set up the Linux
file systems on the partitions you want to use for that. Then,
once it's all ready to go, you can use xxcopy or some other tool
like it (especially for the Linux stuff ;-) to just copy the
EXACT contents of the old partitions. Some tweaking MAY be
necessary, but shouldn't be. Then you have the rest of the new
drive to do whatever you want with - add more data, play around
with BeOS, etc. Keep the old drive as a backup just in case,
unless you have a good DVD-R/CD-R backup strategy.
An alternate way to EXACTLY copy the contents is to use whatever
program you like (xxcopy will do it, as will Acronis etc.) to
make images of the partitions. But you'd have to install XP on
the new XP partition and the xxcopy program to import the image.
Extra step.
I have a feeling you knew all this anyway. In fact you may
correct some of my advice.
--
There are only two classifications of disk drives: Broken drives
and those that will break later.
- Chuck Armstrong (This one I think,
http://www.cleanreg.com/,
not the ball player. But who knows. I can't remember where I got
the quote. But it's true.)