can i move operating system to a different drive?

low space on c/drive,ive tryed to clean it up but cant, can i move operating system to a different drive?i have a old pc thats got a 4 gb drive on the c drive ,this is the one that the operating system is on and im getting low disc space,i have an extra 20 gb drive on the pc and want to know if i can move the operating system,by copying the file to the drive with 20gb with out a windows xp disc ,i dont have one and the system runs great other than that.

i think id have to go to bios or something to get it to start up with the 20gb drive and dont know how to do that either if its possible,i dont have the xp disc that was used to install it.

thanks jwb38

 

when i open windows explorer and look under view i dont see options??
so i can't go any farther with the step on that link ,hummmmm

 

I'm going to suggest an idea that sounds really silly at first, but does make sense. Connect both drives, setting the new one to slave, and disable your screen saver anti-virus. Anything that'll interfere with a large scale transfer. Now, copy+paste your C:\windows.

 

and after that, make the new drive the master and the old the slave??
if so then ill give that a try,do i need to do something about the hidden files or will they go to with the copy and paste of everything without doing something?thanks for helping me with this

 

Triaxx2 please get back to me ,when i tryed to copy the c\drive 4gb with hidden files to the slave d\drive i got a error mess about the file being copyed ,write procteted,now what ?thank you

 

Try copying them from DOS, using a boot disk. Some of the files are probably system files that it's using while XP is running.

As for the hidden files, a complete copy paste of the windows folder should move those as well.

 

im not sure how to do that (copy them from dos).please get back to me about it.
thank you

 

Do you know the manufacturer of your 20Gb hard drive?

If so go to their website. They should have a downloadable program for setting up a new drive. Choose the DOS version. There will probably also be a PDF manual you can download. I have used Maxtor and Western Digital versions, both worked in exactly the same way. I guess most HD makers are similar:

After downloading the file double click on it in Windows to run it.
You will be prompted to put in a floppy disk.
This will create a DOS boot disk.

Note before you go any further: if you have anything on your 20Gb hard drive at the moment that you want to keep you should backup everything now. (There are ways round this if you have too much data to back up easily. If this is the case let me know and I will suggest an alternative method.)

Having backed up your data put the boot disk in the floppy drive and reboot your computer to start the program.
There should be an option to set up the new drive as a boot drive which will format the drive and copy over all files.

 

Getting into Dos is the hard part I've been told, since XP doesn't have dos functionality. Or isn't supposed to from what I've been told.