The XMEN Clan Forums

two seperate posts, really, but hey - I'm a little lazy. First off, I got a 6Gb iPod mini, and it's one of the coolest toys ever. I love it.

Seond, I bought a new 120Gb maxtor HDD, and am going to be installing it Wed. sometime. It's going to be the new boot drive, and the main spot for installed programs, and my question to you is this: Do I want to use the MaxBlast software to "migrate" everything from the old drive, and use the Cable Select jumpers, or do I want to simply reinstall, and start again, and then transfer what I need, then format the old drive? I've been considering it both ways, but haven't decided, looking at time / performace issues... I don't mind spending the time to do a fresh install, but I want to have the performance benefit outweigh the time savings of the other route...

I can't honestly tell you that without a lot more info, so do the old pro vs con list and see what YOU want to do.

Maxblast would be convenient, no difficult decisions.
Reinstalling would give you a chance to clean up all the junk that you've forgotten about, but would take more time and you'd have to dig up installation media for everything.

Something I do when the new drive is huge is to copy everything on the old drive to a directory on the new. Then I move (not copy) data from the old directory to the appropriate spot on the new drive, delete stuff I know I won't need, and the stuff I'm not sure about can hang around for a while just in case. This way I can see all the junk that was on the old, and there's no chance the system will be using it "accidentally." If something needs a dll that was tucked away in the windows directory, I can go get it.
Since you're going to be keeping the old drive in the system, this suggestion is less practical for you, but it would let you format the old drive clean.

I make the new drive a master or slave on the secondary IDE channel.

then I use a win98 boot disk to boot up in Dos, then I load Symantec Ghost 8 to make a mirror image of the old drive to the new drive.

Move the new drive in place of the old drive in the IDE channels and boom! You are running. Very easy. Takes about 15 mins.

Hrm... I don't have Ghost 8, so that's out... I think I'll just reinstall WinXP clean, and I'm gonna make a backup of some stuff and throw it over to my laptop, then I'll format both drives at the same time. Drive 2 is going to be for nothing other than music storage anyway, and patches, etc. If I were to partition the new drive so I had a Windows Partition, then a Apps partition, how big should the Windows partition be? 10 Gb? 20?

XP uses almost 2 1/2 gigs I believe... Just for itself...


I just install new drive and install on it and setup old drive as slave. Then over the next few weeks transfer what I need to the new drive and reinstall over it to fix REG keys. After everthings over that I want I wipe he second clean.. ORrrrrr I go to Ice's house and let him fixit

I'd let him fix it, but I don't want to pay for shipping.

Its best to just re format, that way you get rid of all the garbage you dont use and any other issues you dont know of are gone as well. then i would just copy over any other files you want form the old drive. Then format it.

The only negative on this is time. But this way you know exactly what ya have. And all the latest drivers are loaded as well.

I made a backup of the stuff I wantred to keep. and put it on my laptop. I haven't done the deed yet, but will shortly.

Another vote for fresh re-install. While XP isn't nearly as bad as older versions of Windows for 'INI creep', it does do it, albeit very slowly. Witness my dad's XP box, going on something like five years now without a hitch.

Me, I'm a yearly-reinstall man. Or every six months. Keeps the crap from building up, makes for a great excuse to pore over all my old files and toss stuff I don't want any more.

Or, you could always go Teh Uber-G33k route and use older equipment to make a small server in your house. This is precisely what I plan to do in the coming years--go through that box of old parts I've got sitting around, slap together a quiet box, stuff it in a corner, install Linux, and turn it into the House Server.

I formatted both drives, and am on a fresh install of Win XP right now. This new HDD is MUCH faster than my old one. And having 180Gb of storage on my machine now is something I've never had before...

I formatted both drives, and am on a fresh install of Win XP right now. This new HDD is MUCH faster than my old one. And having 180Gb of storage on my machine now is something I've never had before...

Ohhh double poster

Ohhh double poster

ROFL