For all it's worth that 40gb hard drive may last a long time yet. Your
reason for installing the second 80gb drive was because you needed
additional disk space, not because the other one was failing, right? If
you do a chkdsk on it and it doesn't return a large amount of bad blocks
and if subsequent chkdsk's don't return new bad blocks I would say that
there would be no eminent danger of drive failure.
Also, if you don't use the XP installation on that drive, you seem to
prefer your second installation for some reason or other, there is
nothing stopping you from deleting all* the files on that 40gb drive and
using it for storage and backups.
*EXCEPT: You MUST keep the following files where they are on that 40GB
drive:
- Ntldr
- Ntdetect.com
- Boot.ini
And you MUST keep the active partition flag on that partition. As it is
now the only purpose that the drive seems to serve is to be the boot
disk for your other installation, an essential purpose of course. Should
the drive fail replacing it with another boot drive would not be overly
complicated. You could even boot the second XP installation with a boot
floppy disk.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305595#3
You might want to create one of these disks, try it and keep it in a
safe location in case the boot drive does fail.
To create a boot hard drive you would basically do the same as for the
diskette in the above article.
- Put (slave) the new hard drive in an XP computer.
- Format it with XP disk utility
- Make the drive active with XP disk utility
- Copy Ntldr & Ntdetect.com from the i386 folder or from the XP setup cd
i386 folder on to the drive.
- Copy YOUR boot.ini (from your present installation) to the drive. You
could also make a new boot.ini file providing you included the proper
path in the file.
And there you have it, should be able to boot your pc with that. If you
feel that you can't do it, any pc repair shop should be able to do it
for a very minimal charge, just bring them your boot.ini file on a
diskette and tell them to use it. Then all you need to do is make sure
that the drive is properly jumpered and install it in the computer, it
should work.
John