Hard drive upgrade

Have a PC, 300 MHz Pentium II, 256 MB of ram. Running Windows XP pro. This is a thrift store computer that I bought because the kids have pretty much taken over the one I bought new for the family a few yeas ago. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had this happen! I managed to get the few problems it had worked out and has been great except for two things. The DVD player does not work. I think this is a common problem that happened when the prev. owner upgraded to XP pro. One post I read somewhere said you need a new dvd decoder or an mpeg codec. The ones I have seen available for sale seem to need a faster processer than have. Not the end of the world but it would be nice.

The second thing is much more important. I am running out of space in the 8 Gig. Hard Drive. I do have one I saved from another PC that I tried to get working but the prev. owner hacked the OS files apart in thier effort to clean out their personal stuff. It did boot but had lots of missing file errors. Scraped it when I got this one. I did save the Western Digital Drive. Model WD307AA. 30.7 GB. That was added as a second drive on the other PC. All I can find on WD web site is the specs. I know just enough to get me in trouble about these things. Have it sitting here and wanted a some advice before I attemept it. My Bios is set to auto Detect, Can install it with jumpers to set it as a slave, Should be able to use My computer to right click on it and format it. (Did add one this way to an older dell I had.) I don't think I really need to partition it? But I would really like to transfer everything from the 8 GB drive to this one and make it the master. Just have no Idea what the best and safest way to do this would be. I'm not cheap, just broke. Having two Daughters seems to do that. Any help on this would be great. Thanks David

 

Well what I would do is go ahead and take anything you want off that 30 gig, and put it on whatever space you have left on the 8 gig, then put in your XP pro CD, choose to "Instal Windows XP" and go for a clean install....GO through all the Drive selection/Partition Deletion stages, but dont touch the 8 gig, do everything to the 30 gig...boot from CD only the first time, yadda yadda yadda, im sure you know the rest...

When XP is all installed on that drive....transfer everything over to it....now here is the part that IM not too familiar with....

Somewhere in there, you need to switch your drives to make the 30 gig master, and the 8 gig slave...obviously you need to change the jumpers, but im not sure when you would go about doing this.....after XP is installed? Before? Im not too sure. Hope that helps a little bit.

Final THough: I would definately make the 30 your master, becuase you will want to download all the XP updates and all that good stuff, and you will run out of room on your 8 gig fast.

 

If there is nothing on the 30 Gb drive that you need:

Take the 8Gb drive out of your computer,
Install the 30Gb drive as Primary Master,
Boot up with your Windows CD,
The Windows XP install will Partition and Format the drive for you,
After you are finished with that, Install the 8Gb drive as a Slave
Copy what you want off of the 8Gb drive (You don't need the C:\Windows Folder)
Then reformat the 8Gb drive to clean all the crap off of it, and Voila.

 

sounds like you don't have a copy of xp, so, yes you can put in the second drive as slave...make sure the first is set to master...and format the 30g in windows. as far as the 8 gigs go, windows will run just fine on it, just install your programs to the second. windows xp does not come with a dvd decoder..you have to install one(software) or get a decoder card (kinda obsolete). I think some vid cards decode for you..

 

There it is....well said.