Mike_Mig
Stunt Coordinator
- Joined
- Jan 17, 2002
- Messages
- 59
To start with this computer is close to 4 years old but suits my needs perfectly, put it together myself. So it's not the newest thing. A year or so ago I wanted to add a hard drive to my computer that was running windows XP pro. My original 20 gig HD had been converted from fat32 to NTFS when I went to XP. I added a 120 gig HD for storage purposes, but when trying to use windows to format the 120 gig it would fail at what appeared to be the end of the process. I had gone from windows ME to 98 and probably back and forth some, so I just decided to do a reinstall of XP figuring something was corrupted. It ended up not working as the XP install would fail, the reasons don't matter now. At this point I couldn't even boot to windows so I figured I had to use the 120 gig to load windows to then I would be able to get my files off the 20 gig after I was up and running again. For reasons I couldn't solve at the time I couldn't boot from the XP cd I had so I was going to have to boot from a floppy. All I could get my hands on was my 98 boot floppy. I thought about loading 98 on the 20 gig but as I converted it to NTFS that was a no go, that's why I had to go to the 120 to load windows to. So I ended up loading 98 onto the 120 gig as Fat32 and then loading XP over that, I didn't convert to NTFS because if I had a problem in the future and had to do this again, the 98 boot disk wouldn't be able to recognize the NTFS file system and I'd be kind of screwed. I was now up and running and copied everything I needed off the 20 gig to the 120 gig. This is where I am at now. A 20 gig that has nothing useful on it that I would like to load XP on to use it for only the OS, and the 120 currently with the OS and all other files on it in Fat32 file system. I want the 20 for windows only in NTFS and storage on the 120. That way I could reformat the 20 or whatever I want to do to it without losing my files on the 120. Is there a good way to go about doing this without having to start from scratch, I'm pretty happy with how I'm running, but I never reached my initial purpose. If I reformat the 20 and load XP on it, how would it boot? Would it give me the option of choosing which drive to boot XP from? I use it on my RPTV with custom resolutions that I don't feel like having to mess with as I am happy with how they are now, so I would really like to just take the OS from the 120 and move it to the 20 if that's even possible. Any advice or other recommendations would be much appreciated, then I can work on backing up what I have. Thanks for reading this whole thing.
Mike
Mike