Make a new drive the boot drive.

I am running XP SP2 and
My two IDE drives, "C" and "E" are getting loaded and slow. I have just added a new SATA 500GB drive (drive "G") which seems faster.
Is it possible to move everything on my current bootable drive "C" to the new drive "G" and rename that drive so that it becomes the "C" drive and the one from which the PC boots. If so, are the files copied across or do I end up with all the same files on 2 disks so that the old "C" drive can be reformatted and cleaned?

 

Welcome to Major Geeks.
You could use xxClone or any other disk cloning programs.

 

Hey there,

Potentialy one of the better options would be to clone, ghost or image your current window s drive typically by default C:\. You will need so software such as nortons ghost which is one of the more flexible imaging programs I know of (others here may have alternative suggestions?) Be mindful of the drive letters when ghosting / imaging from one drive to another drive as sometimes the drive letters are altered by the ghosting / imaging software... so C: might be your E: for example or vica versa. Check the drive size before imaging to it, this may help avoid copying over the disk you want to copy data from... :-o

Once your sata drive has been ghosted / imaged too then set it as the first or only boot device in the computers bios.

You may also consider making a secondary partition on the sata drive and then copying all the data from your other drive to the secondary partition on the sata drive. Then you have the option of using your older drives as more storage once formatted or keeping the older drives for backup if theres critical info on them.

At least those are some options, I'd probably go with creating two partitions on the SATA drive, putting your current windows on the first partition, install all other data on the other partition. In other words it maybe easier to make two partitions on the sata drive. Ghost / image each drive to a seperate partition.

Take it from there - in regards to the other drives which wont be required anymore, what to use them for you could reformat these and use as extra storage or backup.

You may also want to look at using some of the SATA hard disk raid array options or configurations for backing up data, such as mirroring or stripping amongst several raid configurations as an option. Although a second sata drive is usually required..so your budget may have a say in this.

There's heaps of info online about sata configurations and best practices for raid array hard disk's configurations - for a backup option.

Good luck with this one:wave

 

Thanks for all that comprehensive info, I shall print it out and inwardly digest before I start swapping disks.
regards