Win xp on both harddrives.

[Gray Fox]

I just bought a new Hard Drive, it's my second, I want to install windows XP
on the new drive. As far as I know that should not be a problem, I will simply
be presented with a boot option when I turn my PC on.

But when I'm done copying stuff over to the new drive and determine it works
fine, I want to format the first drive and just have windows on the second
drive.

Would that present any problem? Would I still get a boot option even though
there is no windows on the first drive. And what if I decide to delete windows
on the second drive, and keep it as it is on the first.

 

[No Limit]

It won't be a problem. Actually to get a boot menu you will have to modify your boot.ini file. Otherwise you will have to set in your bios which hard drive you want to load off (or on newer bios versions you can hit a key at start up and select the hard drive). Then you can delete any installation of whichever hard drive you want without issues. Obviously if you modified your boot.ini file to display a menu you will have to change it back.

 

[Asus]

I would probably remove the 1st drive that has windows on it now before installing windows on the 2nd drive. Then after you have windows installed put the other drive back in.
That way it won't touch the 1st drive with the 2nd install. And you won't accidentally hit FORMAT on the wrong drive during windows setup.

 

[VirusType2]

I did a direct drive to drive mirror copy, turned off the PC, then physically switched the 1st drive with the 2nd. I didn't mess with any boot options in the bios or anything.

I just swapped slave master on the drives themselves. (If you have SATA you will need to use the bios to select the master drive, since SATA doesn't have a physical slave/master setting.)


Once you've done that, your computer will now be booting from the new copy of windows and you can safely delete the other drive, or leave it as a backup copy of Windows. XP doesn't take that much space TBH, and you can still use the drive as storage.