Hi,
I just purchased an 80Gb Seagate Barracuda and i was looking to make this the master drive on my system. My other hard disk is a 40Gb Barracuda with Windows Xp Home on it. I want to totally format this drive, uninstalling the Operating System and all the files. I was wondering what would be the best way to go about this? I would like to have a totally fresh start, with my operating system installed on my new Hard Disk.
Cheers
The best way to do it is to add the new drive in master position on your primary IDE channel, placing the old drive as slave on the same channel. Install your OS to the newer drive, ignoring the old one for now. Once you’ve got your new OS up, simply have the OS itself format your drive. Then you can use it for additional storage.
Of course, make sure to back up anything important before hand. It’s not impossible, but it is pretty hard to get your data back when you go and format the drive.