Replacing HD and OS with minimal fuss

[marshahu]

I have been more than patient having to put up with a tiny 10GB Hard Drive and now I want to replace it with a nice 160GB monster as well as a 40GB SATA drive to boot from. However I am stuck with ME so I wanted to install Windows XP Pro and transfer files with a minimum of fuss.

First can I use a 160GB Hard Drive on an ECS K7S5A and use it as one whole hard drive? I don't want to have to split the drive up due to capacity limitations. Also if I had Windows XP Pro set on Primary master and I connected the 10GB hard drive with Windows Me on the primary slave, would the PC boot into Windows XP Pro, give me a choice of OS's to use or not start at all.

Is it feasible to keep my 10GB w/Me drive connected on primary slave, boot into Windows XP Pro on the new drive, and then just copy files from the primary slave to my new hard drive? Some files are bigger than 700MB and I really dont want to have to keep feeding in CDs or spend money to lease a backup drive to transfer the files over. If so what steps will I need to undergo?

Also I wanted to buy an SATA controller for the PC so I could have a 40GB drive to boot into windows. Is it possible to combine the two new drives (one SATA one parallel) and make them appear as one.

Thank you for your help

PC Spec: AMD Athlon XP 2000+ running at 1.25ghz, ECS K7S5A Motherboard, 768MB SDRAM PC133, Sparkle nVidia Riva TNT2 M64 32MB AGP Graphics Card, Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 6.1, Windows Me

 

[HammerBot]

Yes, I believe that board should have no problems regarding large drives. It is relatively new right? (or am I mistaken?)
Although you wish to have one large partition, I recommend splitting it into a few. This gives a number of advantages (see previous posts on THGC). First of all, you can limit the OS to a small partition in the beginning of the drive, where access is fastest. Further, defrag and file recovery can be performed faster on a subset of the drive.

To transfer the files easy, I recommend:
1) Install your new drive as master, and the old 10GB as slave.
2) Boot from the XP installation CD. It allows you to partition your new drive as you see fit. Proceed with installing XP on the new drive.
3) Once XP is up and running, copy the wanted files from the old drive to the new one.
4) Discard the old drive. You don't want a 10GB old slow drive.

If you wish to have buy a SATA controller and a SATA drive as well, this is certainly possible. However, I don't understand why you would have any PATA drives then. Get The SATA controller and ONE nice big 200 GB drive. There is no problem booting from a SATA drive. You can set that up in the BIOS.

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