Is this alright to do?

mr_fishbulb

My uncle's hard drive on his computer has gone kaput. Bad sectors all over the place. Stuck it in my machine and backed up all his data.

He's now ordered a new hard drive. A big one - about 200 gig, but here's the problem: Although he has a copy of XP Home (it came with the machine and he has a product code taped onto the machine case. It's an official copy) it's not even Service Pack 1 so will not register a hard drive bigger than 137gig.

Is it alright to download a copy of XP home that has already been slipstreamed to SP2 to install XP onto his new hard drive so it sees the whole space (as long as he uses his product code he got with the machine)?

I'm assuming it's alright as he has a licence for XP Home, but not an SP2 disk.

Lob_Rockster

what I'd do is use about 40Gb for XP and then install there. Leave the rest free....this should cope with a bunch of programs and games fully-installed.

Service it the billion times it'll need and then use Disk Management to make a second partition.

Use said partition for data. This will also result in the caveat that, should XP need reinstalling, you can do so without trashing his data. Of course, he should still backup

mr_fishbulb

Cheers. Will XP disk management allow an new partition to be made without losing the fresh XP install, or do I need something like Partition Magic?

Chippy_Minton

You can install XP followed by SP2 separately. No need to install a slipstreamed SP2 to get over the 137Gb barrier.

Chippy_Minton

mr_fishbulb wrote:

Cheers. Will XP disk management allow an new partition to be made without losing the fresh XP install, or do I need something like Partition Magic?

Yes, Disk Management can create and format new partitions without losing the XP (C: ) partition.

Little_John

Its a pain in the !!!!!! the 137GB limit especially for new installs like you will be doing.

The best way to install it has been sugested, create a small partition 40GB is too much 20GB would be my max limit I usually go for 10GB and install XP and the common used apps like office on that partition any thing else goes on the 2nd partition that you create once windows is installed. this keeps the windows install clear of junk and the pc will perform better if things go south then you wont loose the stuff stored on the 2nd partition unless the drive fails. remember to move the my documents over tot he 2nd partition also.

installing stuff does require you to use the custom option I just change the drive letter from c: to d: or what ever the 2nd partition letter is

Chippy_Minton wrote:

Yes, Disk Management can create and format new partitions without losing the XP (C: ) partition.

That is correct as long as you dont touch the existing partition, the only way to make changes to the 1st partition is with other tools like partition magic and I have had some sucess and some not so sucessful experiences with it. seeing as you will have a new install you have noting to loose other than the 40 minutes it takes to install windows again.

Elf_2

You can download Microsoft Service Pack 2 from here.

-TangleFoot-

I prefer to do the slipstream thing myself:

• Get the Service Pack (or order it on CD)
• Use nLite to put it all together