reformatting former system drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter ed jurewicz
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ed jurewicz

I recently replaced my son's system drive and did a clean install of xp. It
sits as the master on the primary ide interface. He now would like to use
the old primary drive for storage. If I place the drive as the slave on the
primary ide, are there any precautions. I have heard of some people
experiencing problems when installing additional drives with a previous
version of an operating system on it. But I cannot remember the exact
issueds experienced or the recommended fixes.
 
ed jurewicz said:
I recently replaced my son's system drive and did a clean install of xp. It
sits as the master on the primary ide interface. He now would like to use
the old primary drive for storage. If I place the drive as the slave on the
primary ide, are there any precautions. I have heard of some people
experiencing problems when installing additional drives with a previous
version of an operating system on it. But I cannot remember the exact
issueds experienced or the recommended fixes.
Click to expand...

Slaved with the current information that is on it still in tact?
Sometime two 'active' Primary partitions can cause problems. If the info and
files are not necessary on the soon to be slaved drive, then format and
partition it from the diag disk that you can get from the manufacturers web
page or a startup disk from windows ME or 98.
 
ed,

I just did this on one of our machines and, although everything was jumpered
correctly, I couldn't get 'format' to work or the maxblast utility disc to
work.

However, in XP you can go to Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Computer
Management | Disk Management and format from Disk Management. It worked for
me.

Wayne
 
ed jurewicz said:
I recently replaced my son's system drive and did a clean install
of xp. It sits as the master on the primary ide interface. He now
would like to use the old primary drive for storage. If I place
the drive as the slave on the primary ide, are there any
precautions. I have heard of some people experiencing problems
when installing additional drives with a previous version of an
operating system on it. But I cannot remember the exact issueds
experienced or the recommended fixes.
Click to expand...

Probably not any permanent complications. I don't think it will make
the system dependent on the old drive if you were to boot into
Windows XP with the old drive installed.

Before doing anything unnecessary, copy out any important files that
might be on the old drive. Do that at your first opportunity.

You can try installing the old drive and formatting it from a floppy
disk or CD boot disk before you even boot into Windows. Or you can
try formatting it from within the new installation of Windows XP.

I probably would just boot into the new installation and make sure
that I am using the correct operating system, and then delete the
system files (C:\Windows\system) from the old Windows installation.
Or maybe do that from a boot disk before booting into Windows.

Actually, since I use a disk manager (PartitionMagic or Partition
Manager), I would just tell it to format that disk, and if necessary
it would reboot the system to do the formatting. If I had kids, a
disk manager probably would be the most important computer related
item I owned. Buy one and learn how to use it.

The most important thing before you mess around with hard drives is
to be sure that any important files are copied to removable media.

Good luck.
 
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