Additional Hard drive installation question

[mmyers63]

I am looking for some advice about adding another hard drive to my computer. Currently I have a 120 gig SATA 150 as my master drive, which is full thus the need to add another drive, and an IDE hard drive that I use for backups, ghosts and music. I just bought a WD 250 gig SATA 300 hard drive that I want to use as the master with a clean install of XP and my other software. My question to the community is this, am I able to put this new drive on the master SATA, move the old SATA drive to the slave connection without wiping XP from it and all my other software? Basically I want to install the 250 gig drive, install windows, office, and some other software, copy over files, data and other software, then wipe the old 120 gig drive. I'm not sure if this will cause any problems or conflicts.

Thank you in advance for your help!
Marc

 

[DukeDave]

As you have said that you want to reinstall windows I would suggest that you put the system together with just the new hard drive and perform the installation.

After you have installed windows, then connect the extra drives and make sure you have configured the correct one in the bios to boot from the new drive.

This should enable you to copy all of your data from the old drive before reformatting it.

 

[croc]

SATA does not have a 'master / slave' relationship. Every drive connected will be listed as 'master'. You select the boot order in your BIOS as to what your boot preference is.

As DukeDave suggested, make this the only drive, do your re-install bits, then start introducing your other drives back into the system. Sounds complicated, but once you go through it not really...

 

[mmyers63]

Thanks for the advice guys!