Good Morning can anybody help me please?
I wanted to reformat my hard drive and reinstall Xp so i bought a 2nd hard drive to back my data up onto while i do this, when installing this new 2nd drive i noticed i when installing it from the Manufacturers CD it always formatted it first, so how am i gonna be able to reinstall it again onto my original hard drive with xp on without losing my backed up data?
any help most appreciated

Hi Zarnee23
Welcome to PCHF

I Install all my harddrives maybe I can offer a helping hand? But please stick to one thread lol dont wanna play tag in here :-) Did your PC come with XP pre-installed or do you have the Disk?

hiya lol yeah xp was pre-installed but i do have the xp recovery disk

would just like to know if i can reinstall 2nd hard drive back onto my system without refomatting it first, and how i can do this

Welcome to the forums Zarnee23

You shouldn't need to use your manufacturers CD to get this 2nd hard drive to work. You only need to run that manufacturers CD once so that it can format the hard drive ready for use.

What size is this new hard drive and what size is your old hard drive?

The reason I ask is because if the new hard drive is bigger is capacity then why not install Windows XP onto it and use it as your primary drive.
You can then copy everything off your old drive.

If you don't want to do it that way then you can follow these instructions:
Now that the drive is formatted you can copy all of your old information that you want to keep onto the new drive.

Once you have made sure you have everything, power down the system and remove the new drive.
Place your Windows XP CD into the drive and boot the computer (make sure you have the bios set to boot from CDROM first)

You can follow these instructions if you need help installing XP.
http://www.pchelpforum.com//showthread.php?t=11566

Once windows is installed plug in your new drive and copy the information back onto your system. (there is no need to use the manufacturers CD, windows will automatically detect it)

Well then if you already installed the second drive and can transfer you files to it just unplug the slave run a complete restore on the other drive plug in slave abnd transfer files back to the primary drive no need to re-install the slave after