Changing out Hard Drives then upgrading System

My system is an AMD 2800+ which has 3 older HDs. One is 40GB eide, One 80GB eide and One is 160GB Sata.

All three drives have been used as the primary drive at some point.

All three drives have some currently used programs and data files on them.

All three drives have the XP intall on them.

I am hoping to consolidate the files, move everything to one hard drive and then upgrade the whole shooting match to a new system.

The new system would be something like an AMD 5000+ duo, with a reasonable ASUS motherboard and 2 500GB hardrives that I would Raid 01.

Can anyone point me to a guide or guides that would help me do this?

Thanks

Groovey58

 

Plug the new drive in the existing pc, format it, go to the new drive's manufacturer's site for free software for migrating OS, use this disk to boot up and copy the existing OS drive to the new one, disconnect the old OS drive, move the new one to where the old OS drive is. i.e. IDE0 or IDE1. Make sure you didn't mess up the drive order or else XP will error out saying "NTLDR is missing". Do NOT plug both OS drives in at the same cuz XP will write stuff to MBR or screw up the drive letter. i.e.

Your existing drive setup is:

IDE0=XP
IDE1=80GB
IDE2=160GB

You put the new drive to:

IDE3=NEW

After copying os, disconnect IDE0 and move IDE3 to IDE0. Once XP boots up, it will load a driver for the new hard disk. Restart when asked. Then do this before swapping out the mobo:

http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=Articles&go=read&arc_id=36