Replace Main Hdd, With Another Hdd.

[Chesso 0]

To be more specific, I have Windows XP Home with Service Pack 1 currently installed on my main (but old) 20gb hard disk.I have recently installed Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2 intergrated on my other primary hard disk (I made a new partition for it of 20gb's, meaning this hard disk has 2 partitions, D:\ and F:\, F:\ has the new WinXP Home SP2 installation).If I remove my main hard disk, and hook up my other hard disk as the only one (which now has WinXP Home SP2) will it boot up just fine? or do I need to do anything special.My plan is to fix up the second one like my first one without all the bloat and crap, and on a more reliable hard disk and then just chuck the old one away and get another good one.This way I can eventually have and retain all my configuration, drivers, software and there settings, all work related data setup etc.Any help is greatly appreciated.

[foolakadugie 0]

To be more specific, I have Windows XP Home with Service Pack 1 currently installed on my main (but old) 20gb hard disk.
I have recently installed Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2 intergrated on my other primary hard disk (I made a new partition for it of 20gb's, meaning this hard disk has 2 partitions, D:\ and F:\, F:\ has the new WinXP Home SP2 installation).

If I remove my main hard disk, and hook up my other hard disk as the only one (which now has WinXP Home SP2) will it boot up just fine? or do I need to do anything special.

My plan is to fix up the second one like my first one without all the bloat and crap, and on a more reliable hard disk and then just chuck the old one away and get another good one.

This way I can eventually have and retain all my configuration, drivers, software and there settings, all work related data setup etc.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

When you installed the new installation, did you install it from a windows CD? Well I think you should be able to do it. If it doesn't work, it shouldn't hurt anything, so there isn't any reason not to try.
If it doesn't boot, you can plug the old drive right back in (unplug the power cable before doing so) Just make sure that when you hook up the new drive that the little jumper piece in on the pins in the
back of the hard drive is set to master primary or cable select. Usually there will be a diagram printed on the drive to show you the placement of the jumper for the different configurations. You may
have to hit the del button when booting up to adjust your BIOS settings (Hit del every second or so until you see a menu pop up, pick the new drive as HD 0 save and exit). If it works, GOOD, if not,
put the old drive back in how it was and figure out what you did wrong.

It might be a bit more complicated though with the different partitions, because I don't know if having the installation on the second partition of the drive would prevent it from booting.
You might be able to adjust that in the BIOS but I am not sure.

[Chesso 0]

Well all drives/partitions are set as primary, meaning they are bootable (according to windows atleas) and I know about the jumper settings, I had trouble with multiple drives and that in particular a few years ago.Good point, I'll give it a shot, once I get everything migrated manually (I don't trust that file/settings transfer wizard).

[SilverFox1405241541 0]

Just pop in the other disk.You might need to reactivate windows if its a new motherboard.But I've used the same HDD in several PCs. Your removing the other one right?

[WeaponX 0]

If that newer hard drive was used on this same exact computer to install Windows XP with SP2, there probably won't be any problems using it. Not 100% sure if XP needs to be on the first partition, but give it a try. If it doesn't work, one thing I recommend checking is if it's the Active Partition. You can use a Windows 98SE bootdisk (get one at http://www.bootdisk.com/) and use fdisk to set that F: partition to be the active one. That should make it be recognized as the bootable partition

[Grafitti 0]

You may run into trouble with the BIOS. Hopefully it will just switch to the new disk without a hitch, but it might give you any number of errors, including "missing hal.dll", or booting till the XP logo and restarting. If hal.dll problem appears, check in BIOS that hard drive is correctly set as primary. I've noticed the BIOS sometimes switching boot priorities around when adding/removing hard disks, especially with SATA ones. If it continually reboots without giving you the welcome screen, pop the xp cd in and boot to the recovery console, then run fixboot and if that by itself doesn't work, then run fixmbr and then fixboot again, and after that it should work. ---or at least it's always worked for me.

[Chesso 0]

Cool thanks, I'm using older IDE though not SATA or anything like that (older ATA I should say rather than the newer SATA).The drive and partition(s) themselves are set as primary and bootable, just like the main disk and is active of course, I have it dual-booting at the moment.The main purpose is that I bought WinXP with SP2 intergrated (the old one was XP Home and slipstreamed SP1 or what ever, step-father got it for me), and having them dual-booted so I can have the new one all setup while I have the old one with everything I need for reference or exchange if necessary, I'm just hoping when I replace my CPU the newer installation won't die on me lol (my old cpu, the fan and heatsink is buggered and only has a temp fix, but the heat problem with it is becoming increasingly worse).

[WeaponX 0]

There should be no problem in that case if you are only replacing the processor with another one. If you do run into problems, try the fixboot and fixmbr commands as mentioned earlier by Grafitti.

[yordan 10]

No news since yesterday ? Does that mean that Chesso has no computer any more ? We told him that he could remove the old disk, remove the old processor, put the new processor, put the new disk, and everybody should work fine. Does his silence mean that we were wrong and he should not perform the changes we told him to do ?Ouch !

[Chesso 0]

lol nah it's all good.I'm waiting for a future freelance work payment until I go and buy the new processor, in the mean time I'm doing the actual freelance work I spoke of, and setting the second installation up like the first one (aside from updated software, and better approaches to certain things etc).Problem is though I only found 1 online/shop in Australia that has my processor and it's not even a good one.I'm stuck on old 478PIN and everyones selling 775 now . (I use a Celeron D, screw blowing money of straight P4's).