Hey guys, sorry if this has been asked before - i'm new here.

I currently have a packard bell pc with a 40GB hard drive and i'm wanting to upgrade to a 250GB hard drive.

When i originally bought my pc it didnt come with a seperate Windows XP cd, all the files were pre-installed on the the hard drive, the only thing that came with it was a recovery floppy disk. Now i remember when i first booted up there was a 'Master CD Creator' facility (or something like that) on the desktop, which i used and it created 3 individual Master CD's on some CD-R's.

Now, my question is when i install the new hard drive will i be able to use those 3 master cd's i created to install window xp on to the new hard drive - or will i have to make a seperate purchase of Window XP again?
(For the record - on the hard drive thats currently installed (the one that came with my pc) there a sticker on it saying '2GB allocated for recovery', so i'm guessing when i created those 3 master cd all that data would have been transferred to those CD-Rs) Also, if i am able to use the master cds on the new hard drive, will my product key still be valid?

Hope the above makes sense, lol

Any help would be greatly appreciated,
Thanks,
Chris

One more question, What is the best (and easiest) way to go about installing windows xp on a new drive? Rather than having to going through the hassle of re-installing drivers and programs etc, could i use the programs mentioned in this thread http://www.pchelpforum.com/windows-x...ard-drive.html to help me transfer all the files?

I do have a external hard drive (80GB) that i could maybe use somehow in the process (its connected to my pc via a normal USB port - if that matters)

Again, any help or advice you guys could give would be excellent

Hello Chris

Welcome at PCHF! Hope you have a great time with helping others and maybe getting helped by others!

To give an answer on your question: Most likely this works. A friend of mine had the same problem with a HP and that worked. At the 2 gig there's the recoveryfiles installed. With a HP you have 2 options to recover the pc. First is to create a floppy, restart the pc with that floppy and then it will recover from the harddisk. But when the harddisk is not working anymore, you've lost the recoverpart and so you're 'installation' disk. The other way is to create the disks, which you have done, with the files on it. So this has to work.

Only one thing: Cause you've only changed your harddisk there's not a problem. But when you're going to change other things like proc and motherboard, the chance is very little that the recoverdisks will work anymore cause the orgininal configuration has to much changed.

So to reinstall Windows: Make a copy of all your documents etcetera on the extern harddisk, open the case, replace the old harddisk for the new one (you can use the old one as slave, just change the jumper) and reinstall it with the cd's you've maked.

Tell me if this has helped you. If not: Tell also, maybe I or other members of PCHF are able to help you further!


Greetings

Thanks CyFanate for the info! Thats a relief to know that i won't have to fork out money to buy Windows XP again!

Insead of using the master cds, how would i go about 'cloning' all of my hard drive files (including all the windows xp boot up files) ?

So bascially, i would by transferring all the files from my current internal drive to my external drive, then transferring all the data from my external drive back to my new internal drive.

Is that possible? It will just save me having to mess about downloading various sofware and re-configuring all my hardware drivers etc.
^^
Again, hope that makes sense.

Sorry for all the questions - i'm a total noob when it come this kind of thing!!

If you use the master cd's then all the software and drivers that where installed when you got the pc wil automaticly be reinstalled aswell. So no need to look for drivers or anything.

But you would loose everything that you have installed/done on youre pc after that.

But you can indeed clone youre hd with the app Radar posted or these are also free apps you could use:

Xcopy:

http://www.xxcopy.com/index.htm

DrvImagerXP 2.2:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/...ImagerXP.shtml

My xp was pre installed when i purchased my pc i had to format the disk for some reason however i ran the recovery disk on the formatted hard drive and worked just like it did when got it