replacing hard drive.

[sinnistar]

I am trying to replace a drive. The drive I'm replacing is the Master and I installed a drive as slave then loaded a new version of XP and moved over all my settings and files. I already have everything set up on the new drive, (windows and all my files and settings). The new drive is slave to the old drive. Someone said, remove the old drive, set the new drive to master, and boot to the cd and load windows. The question is:

If I do that, will it delete my settings and my files? Can I install windows again, this time when the new drive is the master and the old drive is gone.


If it isn't clear: I want to avoid starting over!

[Project-Shadow]

It depends on how you copied everything over.
Ideally what you should of done is use norton ghost, to copy the drive. [Master to Slave] remove the master, and change the slave to master via the jumper settings and you'll be good to go. From the sounds of it you've done something like this, just make sure you've got the slave set as master and it should boot up without a CD, [That is assuming you've got windows installed on it]

Simply copying stuff across wont work, but either way you will not lose all your data. However assuming you misplace the jumpers you may short the drive/motherboard [i've done it twice -_-'']

[Yaay]

Windows XP has a Setting Transfer Feature.. See if it helps.

[Barefootsies]

You would need the OS installed on whatever you want as master. If your slave is a 2nd HD, and used for storage, and has files on it, and you want to make it a master, then you will need to install the OS. So yes, you might lose your files. Then you change your jumpers, and pin in back of HD from slave to master.

Before hand, I'd buy an ext HD, and pull all files from the slave, to the ext HD, then after backed up, and checked, you would install the OS on slave, and then flip to master.. pins, jumpers, etc.

After installed, pull everything back from ext HD, on to the new master. Tada. Done. I had to do this about two months ago.