I am going to be upgrading my father inlaw's hard drive next week from a 20gb to a 160gb hard drive. He is on Windows ME right now but i will be putting Windows XP pro on the new drive. What is the easiest way to do this upgrade. Can you just put the old drive as a slave drive, do a fresh install on the new drive.....install his games and other software.....then copy his settings from the old drive into the program files? Will this take all his settings and files from the old system? Will this work. Is there an easier way or are there any guides around on how to exactly do this if I am not doing this correct? Please Help.
Hard drive Upgrade
- Thread starter free_bert
- Start date
Depends on whether you want the second drive for games/apps only or also the operating system. If you want it for games/apps only then its a simple slave drive install and reinstall his games/apps onto the drive.
However if you want a performance boost youmight want to do a fresh install on the drive set as a master.
You can get software which copies settings from a HD to a HD like [google]Norton Ghost[/google] and that'll transfer all files and settings to the new drive, but it may be easier to just reinstall everything on the new drive.
However if you want a performance boost youmight want to do a fresh install on the drive set as a master.
You can get software which copies settings from a HD to a HD like [google]Norton Ghost[/google] and that'll transfer all files and settings to the new drive, but it may be easier to just reinstall everything on the new drive.
i have programs like drive image that I could use but i didnt know if it would work becuase it is going from Windows ME to XP Pro. He is going to be using the new 160gb drive as the new master. i was just going to format the old drive after I was done so he could use it for extra storage. So doing a fresh install on the new drive.......you can copy the program files (after you have reinstalled on the new drive) from the old ME drive and paste them into XP to keep all his settinigs?
ThePenguinCometh
There is no escape
free_bert said:
Unlikely as, while you can copy the files across, you won't have the registry entries so the programs probably won't work (unless they're very old or small programs). You should look at the programs themselves individually, you might be able to save the settings or find the config file and save them. Then when you re-install the programs you can restore the settings or copy the config file to the appropriate place. Otherwise you will probably need to manually reconfigure your programs. Tell us what programs you need to copy over and maybe someone can give you more specific help.
Anti-Trend
Nonconformist Geek
Export their database. Install Windows on their new hard drive, followed by Quickbooks. Re-import the database.