hi members
I neeed some help. I have A 120 gig hd with 3 gig of prg files and drivers on it mostly downloads and updates. win xp is playing up so have bought new xp home and 500 gig hd both western digital ide. W hat i want to do is install new xp on new drive save everything from 120 except windows from old drive and put them on new drive how do i go about it.robin

Here's what I'd do.
1. Install the new 500Gb as a secondary drive.
2. Copy all your data across
3. Re-format the 120Gb and re-install XP.

But if you don't want that then the process is this.

1. Remove 120Gb and replace with 500Gb.
2. Format and build 500Gb
3. Install 120Gb as a secondary drive (see below) and then copy data over to 500Gb.

There are several ways of achieving secondary and primary drives on one IDE channel. The first is to move the jumpers on the drives to be master and slave but my preference is to set both drives as 'cable select' and ensure corrcet positioning on the cable.

With cable select the master disk needs to be at one end of the cable (ither end is plugged to teh system board). The secondary drive sits between the two ends.

Have fun.

Hi robby256.

A single 500GB partition is ridiculously too large to manage. It's best if you break it up into several smaller partitions.

For a limited and unknown period of time a free version of Partition Magic 8.0 can be downloaded.

Download Partition Magic 8.0 Free Trial - Allows you to create, resize and merge partitions.

PartitionMagic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Info on PM and its history.

With PM8 you can subdivide a hard drive into multiple partitions (each will have its own drive letter). Make only "Primary" type partitions to stay out of trouble.

The "magic" part of PM is that is can resize and existing partition with data on it already and preserve all the data! XP's utility DISKMGMT.MSC will destroy all the data when it resizes a partition.