Replace 2nd HDD on Dell Dimension E520 PC

RoyalSwank

I have a Dell Windows XP Media Centre Edition 2005 to Windows Vista Home Premium Express Upgrade disk
I have a genuine Vista Home Premium Key.
I've been thinking of upgrading to Windows 7
Might I still have problems if I do a clean install?
Would I put the new HDD in before the clean install then just chose the other, smaller drive to install to?
Would this work if I'm using an upgrade disk.

BTW, one day I might get round to using Linux, but not this week!

RoyalSwank

closed wrote: »

According to that, d: is the active partition.

XP? What does boot.ini say, and where are ntldr and ntdetect?

Partition the new disk, and clean install, use the old ones for external/internal backup with disk imaging software.

Don't want to run the OS from my new disk as it's for data storage 5400rpm

RoyalSwank

Richie-from-the-Boro wrote: »

The slowest and safest route because Vista runs a~n~other complication called ' shadow copy ' is to put your old drive back in and go to computer management / drive management and work out which drive is which ! If you are correct in what you say you will see three not two drives in disk management. That's why I said in an earlier post "" what you see is not always what you get ""

When both old drives are in the PC this is what I see in Disk Management:


Disc 0: - Healthy (System, Active Primary Partition)
Disc 1: - C: Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)

closed

Partitioning has a similar effect, and gives a simpler/quieter/less power hungry setup provided you backup.

Back to your problem, boot.ini, ntldr etc?

RoyalSwank

closed wrote: »

Partitioning has a similar effect, and gives a simpler/quieter/less power hungry setup provided you backup.

I've been told not to run OS / applications from a slower HDD??
My smaller HDDs are 7200rpm

closed wrote: »

Back to your problem, boot.ini, ntldr etc?

I'm afraid I don't know what this is?

closed

Look in the root of the drives for boot.ini, and post the contents and which drive they are on.

If you've got the cd handy, nothing to lose by trying out on one drive, to compare speed, rpm isn't the only thing relevant to speed.

RoyalSwank

closed wrote: »

Look in the root of the drives for boot.ini, and post the contents and which drive they are on.

Am searching but can't find boot.ini
I'm running Vista - does that use boot.ini?

tronator

RoyalSwank wrote: »

Am searching but can't find boot.ini
I'm running Vista - does that use boot.ini?

You need to enable showing hidden files.

RoyalSwank

tronator wrote: »

You need to enable showing hidden files.

I'm doing a search using the advanced search with show hidden files ticked and the search is taking forever.

When I look in Local Disk D (with show hidden files enabled) all I see is my data files / folders.

Going to turn in for the night, thanks for everyone's help so far

tronator

RoyalSwank wrote: »

I'm doing a search using the advanced search with show hidden files ticked and the search is taking forever.

You don't need to search, the boot.ini should be in the root folder of C: (or maybe in your case).