Hi everyone,

I am planning on getting a 120GB Western Digital hard drive soon. I already have a Seagate 40GB hard drive and am planning on leaving it in.
I currently run on Win98SE but am wanting to upgrade to WinXP Pro.

My question is: Can I move all the data I want to keep on the new WD 120GB drive, format the old 40GB drive, install XP on that 40GB drive, and safely have all my data still on the WD 120GB.

I hope I posted this this in the right section.

Your Replies are greatly apreciated.
Thanks
Dan

Of course you can. Just connect both drives and move the files.

Partition and format the new drive. Temporarily disable virtual memory on your system. Boot the system up and kill off all the unnecessary tasks (leave explorer and systray but that's about it). Open a dos box from within Win98SE and use the XCOPY command with a bunch of switches (/c /k /h /e /y /r should about do it) to move all the data to the D: drive.

Reconnect the new drive as the master drive. Boot a Win98SE floppy and use FDISK to mark the partition as active. Reboot.

You should have your old Win98SE installation running off the new hard drive now (although virtual memory will still be disabled so it may seem a bit slow).

You should now be able to do whatever you want with your original 40GB drive. It can be you new D: drive or whatever.

Don't forget to reenable virtual memory.

p.s. If you have already upgraded to XP you will need to use Partition Magic to do this type of thing.