Some very, very, very, basic questions.

Gepetto

Gepetto

Gepetto

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Right, being a complete noob to this idea of having more than one HD in a PC, I thought I'd ask a few questions before I begin, (probably very silly questions, but I'd be an even bigger numpty not to ask). :eek:

SWBO's PC harddrive is dying, and I've built up a new system for her with Vista (new) on a 37GB Raptor, which is set up in the BIOS as the "Boot from" source. What I now want to do is put her old HD into her new system, and also put a new 160GB HD in as well, with the idea being to copy her existing HD onto the new 160GB one.

First of all, her old harddrive has XP on it, so I'm wondering if that will cause any problems.

Secondly, I don't really need the XP from the harddrive, and only really want the documents, pictures, e-mail settings, and all the old e-mails. Can I simply copy the bits I want? If so, how? I know I can use Acronis or Ghost to clone the drives, but it's not really necessary.

Thirdly, would I be better off copying the e-mail settings etc. to my OS (Boot) drive, as the machine is used primarily for E-mail, home office, internet and pictures. I was planning on putting MS Office and her pictures on the second disk, and Internet and E-mail on the Raptor if that's possible.

Finally, if I'm able to arrange things as above, how do I get into MS Office and my Pictures as I'm sure I'll be able to save to a particular drive, but will all the items on the second drive show in the Startup Menu as normal? Or will I have to go looking for the second drive?

Sorry if I'm being really dim, but I have to start somewhere, and I did look through this section before posting. There's a lot I've got to learn. It'll be Raid next :eek: to ensure we don't lose any info.
 
adding an XP drive to a Vista computer could cause a few problems. At best you could download Vista Bootloader and you might be able to boot into XP as well as Vista.
 
SWBO's?

You may get a conflict if you put two hardrives with windows on in one machine, if you're lucky it will boot into the one you want. If not you can go into the recovery console and select the OS you want to keep, then run 'fixmbr'.

You can't just copy programs like office from one install to another, as the registry files will be missing. You will have to reinstall all programs. You can copy any files like documents and pictures no problem.

If you have an os on one drive you can install a program and have it save the program files on a separate drive.

Hope this helps.
 
AARGH!!
Misinformation central here :(

It's perfectly possible to add a drive with Windows on to another computer with absolutely no ill effects. Before trying to boot, all you need to make sure is that you have the correct drive selected in the BIOS.
When you've loaded Windows (From the new drive), the old drive you added will probably not have a drive letter assigned to it- Here you need to right-click on My Computer, select Manage & go into Disk Management. Right-click on the new drive, and assign it a drive letter, and everything on it will be accessible :)

All the e-mails etc. will almost certainly be stored in Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data somewhere, but you need to lookup the precise locations for each. Documents and pictures should be pretty self-explanatory to copy across.

Cheers

-Leezer-
 
In an ideal word (in my opinion) you data should be in a different partition to your OS so that should you need to rebuild or replace the HDD you know where your data is without it being hidden within the C: structure. When rebuilding this system this is what I would do, OS on one drive, data on another.
Several times I've looked at PCs for people where the manufacturer has supplied a recovery disc which not only restores the OS but also over writes their data as it is stored on the same partition.
With Outlook you can export emails to a PST file and re-import them onto your new system. For the other email settings it would probably be best to have the old system running along side the new and manually configure the settings (plus make a note of them at the same time for future use). I have my emails on my C: drive and export every month or so to a different disc in case the main disc fails.
As Leezer3 says, if you're booting from the vista partition the PC will see the old XP partition as a data drive, and allow you to copy your data from it, if the drive is dying and you have space on the new drive I would copy the entire drive over to a folder called "oldPC" or something until you are sure you've got all the data you need from it.
 
If you want to change where your pictures are stored, click on 'Computer', open up 'C' drive and find your 'Pictures' folder then right click and then choose 'Properties'. Click on the third header along which is 'Location' and it will have highlighted in a box 'C:\Pictures'. Just change it to the desired location (e.g. 'D:\Pictures'), click on apply and you're done.
 
Hi there :)

Just connect the old hard drive with Windows XP on it, it should then boot into your specified boot drive (The Raptor with Vista on it).

Once Vista has loaded if you then just go into Computer the 2nd hard drive should be there. Go into the drive as usual.

If you where using MS Outlook your email data will be stored in the following location, most likely.

C:\Documents and Settings\%Your user name%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook

You may need to turn the option on to be able to view hidden files and folders.
The file containing your emails will be a .PST file, simply copy this over to your desktop on vista, or within your new Documents.
Then from within Outlook if you go into Tools > Options > Mail seup > Data Files > click on the 'Data Files..' tab then select 'Open Folder..' and navigate to your .PST file you took from the above location.


Your music / pictures etc that where stored in your old PC, assuming you stored them within your My Documents, will be in the following location

C:\Documents and Settings\%User name%


The above info might be a little out as I can't remember 100% the file paths of XP, but they should work. And the outlook info is based on MS Office 2007, but the settings should be relatively in the same places.
 
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