xp across two hard drives

[Guest]

I have an older machine in which I added an extra hard drive and later
upgraded from windows ME to windows xp. It now seems that the upgrade is
striped across my two hard drives (one 10 gig and the other 20) and now I
want to upgrade to a larger hard drive. Since the computer wont boot without
both drives installed, how can I exchange one or both of them without having
to repurchace XP?

 

[Guest]

As long as you have both the original ME disk and XP "upgrade" disk, I think
you should be able to do a clean, fresh install on your new hard drive.
Also, I believe a clean install is lots better. Just backup the old drives,
check the integrity of the back ups, install the new drive, insert the XP
upgrade disk and follow the prompts. The installation will, at some point,
ask you to insert your ME disk for verification.

Good luck.

Mark

 

[Guest]

I doubt that you have a true "stripe". You *generally* can not add a drive to
an existing OS and make it a RAID 0 stripe, especially with WindowsME
(because the active partition is in use). There ways, but way beyond the
scope of this forum.

What is probably happening is that when you remove the 2nd hard drive, your
physical drive jumper settings are set to Master and Slave. Some drives need
to be set to "single Master" in order to be recognized in the BIOS properly
(If they're the only drive).

Discover which physical drive your WINNT or Windows directory is on, then
shut down and remove the 2nd drive. Check your manual and make sure your
jumpers are set properly, boot up, go into the BIOS and make sure it's
detected properly, then boot normally. This should allow you to boot into the
OS on the single drive.

What you'll need to do to migrate your current installation onto a larger
drive is Ghost or other popular drive cloning software. Ghost can put an OS
from a 10GB drive onto a 100GB drive, for instance, expanding the partition
in the same step. Thsi may be a job for a savvy friend or your local comp
shop...

All this being said, Callmark1's process is simpler provided you still have
the ME media... However, I am all in favor of a fresh install of XP Pro FULL
over contaminating my OS with WindowsME.

 

[Guest]

6:59 PM 5/31/2006

Chuck and Chad:

I have never done that particular upgrade but I am pretty sure that
"upgrade" in this instance is a misnomer. The only need for the ME disk is
to verify authenticity. The XP version you would end up with is about as
"FULL" as one can get-- especially once all the SP this and that are blended
in.

I agree that Norton Ghost would be an excellent choice for backing up the
old drive(s). It has variable-rate compression and a great image browser
that would allow the user to choose what files to restore-- and fairly
quickly too. The user could create a small, seperate partition during the
install specifically for the image files and leave it there for years to come
in case they later remembered a particular file they had neglected to
transfer. This has the added advantage of NOT transferring the "clutter"
that most of us have on our machines (well, mine anyway).

Later, Mark

 

[Ron Sommer]

You can copy one or both of the old drives to a new drive.
You remove the drive or drives that are copied.
You may have problems changing the hardware.
You may have to reregister XP.

 

[Michael Stevens]

I have an older machine in which I added an extra hard drive and later
upgraded from windows ME to windows xp. It now seems that the upgrade is
striped across my two hard drives (one 10 gig and the other 20) and now I
want to upgrade to a larger hard drive. Since the computer wont boot
without
both drives installed, how can I exchange one or both of them without
having
to repurchace XP?

Image the drives to the new hard drive, using the hard drive manufactures
software either included with the drive, or downloadable from the
manufacturers web site.

Michael Stevens MS_MVP XP SHELL
http://michaelstevenstech.com