I currently have a Western Digital Caviar SE 250 Gb installed, and want to get a Raptor and put the OS and games on that. But I still want to keep all the info that is currently on my Caviar without uninstalling Windows and formatting. How can I do this?

I'm not in the mood to reinstall everything from an external, is there a way to uninstall or deactivate the Windows on the Caviar so it can be installed on the Raptor without deleting all my info? Will Windows give me crap when it comes to activating it on the Raptor, is deactivating it on the Caviar even possible? I'm running XP Home.

Thanks

Just make the Raptor the new boot drive and install windows xp home on it. Leave everything alone on the Caviar. You can still boot from the Caviar and have your installed games and programs ready, while you reinstall everything on the raptor.

If you need to call Microsoft to activate windows and they ask how many other computers your windows software is installed on the correct answer is none.

So they'll give me a new key for the second drive, right? I hope...

Windows for sure is not going to give me crap about being activated a second time?

if you tell em you bought a new harddrive and needed to reinstall they cant say anything about it. and so long as you dont register online everytime you do it you wont raise any flags

Register online?

If you Ghost or clone the 250 onto the Raptor (if it will fit) your games will run OK. You can reformat the 250 and then copy data back onto it to free up space on the Raptor.

Mike.

Can't I just leave the 250 as is, with Windows on it and everything, and then just reinstall XP and games onto the Raptor? And then once the 250 is connected, uninstall the games? Can that work?

One more thing, I was reading reviews that the Raptor runs really hot, should I get an HDD fan so it or the inside of my case doesn't overheat? Or is that just people being idiots?

my bad i was being more general that just windows when i said that i guess

And yes you can install on the raptor and run the wd caviar as a slave and you shoudlnt have any trouble at all in fact windows wont care if you have two installations, so long as you set your bios to boot from the raptor first. and as far as microsoft goes dont fret over it because your not doing anything to infringe the agreement you accepted when you installed.

Even though it's on two hdds, it's not infringing on the agreement? Isn't that like having two activations going on at once?

Any input on needing a fan for the Raptor?

No sir, when you install a game in Windows it copies files to the windows system folders and makes registry entries related to the game settings. If you create a new windows installation on another drive, the new windows has no idea the game even exists and will not uninstall it as you say.

Once your new windows is installed you can NOT go back and boot into it to uninstall since your boot sector has been reset to the new OS location.

As one gentleman mentioned your "only" viable option that will keep ALL your settings not force you to uninstall anything and allow you to run everyhing "EXACTLY" as you already have it on your new Raptor is to:

1: ghost your existing 250GB HD to an external drive. This copies the entire HD as an image to the external.

2: install the raptor leaving the 250GB alone.

3: ghost the image from the external back to your new raptor

4: reboot your computer and make sure your raptor is the first HD in your boot order, you may even unplug your 250GB just to make sure your raptor is in fact booting as main drive and has all your existing data.

5: once you have booted into your old intact windows but on the raptor, you can shut down and reconnect your old 250

6: now you can reformat your old 250 since all your files are safely and intact on your new faster drive.

7 you also have a nice backup of your data in case anything bad happens in the future.

You are done. Windows will not bother you with any registration as it does not know what has happened and everything installed will still be there. You can now uninstall your games or whatever and reinstall them to your other drive if you like.

What you can do is temporarily get ahold of another big drive, and copy all your stuff over to it. Copy all the stuff you don't want to put on the raptor. (Movies and music and stuff like that.) Then start clearing off your 250 gig drive until what's left will fit on a raptor, with some space to spare. Then clone your old drive onto the raptor, using Western Digital's data lifeguard software. Then copy the files you deleted back onto your 250gig and return the temporary drive from wherever you got it.

I have an external 250 gb Western Digital My Book. So I'll just use that to back up the files.

Even the OS will clone without any problems with Data Lifeguard Tools?

One more thing.

I used the external once before, when I reinstalled Windows on the existing Caviar, and after I ghosted everything onto it from the external. Games wouldn't open and the OS wouldn't work. I'm assuming because I ghosted the OS onto the existing OS, which caused problems. How can I avoid this in the future?

Microsoft's XP activation servers are cleared of all keys every 4 months, so you could theoretically reinstall XP 3 times a year.

Seriously? Why would they do that?

Ghosting an image onto an existing HD whether it contains an existing OS or just data doesn't matter. The ghost image will completely wipe the HD and replace it? I'm not sure why your ghost image did not work as expected.

When you ghost make sure you ghost the entire drive to image and not just a partition. This will make the new drive bootable and an EXACT duplicate of the old drive. If you just ghosted a partition this is why it may have failed on your first attempt.

Just make sure there is enough room on the new drive to take all the data from the old drive. For example your 250GB drive should have less than 150GB of data for the image to fit on your new drive or it will fail. Also, your external drive that holds your image must also have enough space to hold the image. I always use the Fast option for ghost as there is really no huge difference in sizes but it makes the image creation much faster.

Someone told me I had to reformat the slave drive anyway, how do I do that without reinstalling Windows? Which is something I only want to do on the Raptor. Would doing it on Data Lifeguard Tools work?