2 HDD each with it's own OS

[anken]

I'm going to install a new Western Digital 200 GB HDD.
I would like to make it the master drive and keep our current small Hdd as the slave.

Can I transfer the data from the old drive to the new WD Drive?
I'm going to clean install WinXP Home.
So, the old drive still has Win89SE on it.

I would like to transfer most of the data to the new drive and then reformat the older drive. Is this possible?
Do I have to install WinXP on both drives or can I just use it on the master drive?

I appreciate any advice you can give me.
BTW, the new MOBO will be a P4 800 Deluxe.

[rpertusio]

If I understand you correctly, you only need to install WinXP on your new drive. Once you boot up WinXP, you will see your other drive mounted (probably letter D which you can copy files from. WinXP can read both NTFS and FAT32 file systems. (Win98 uses FAT32).

After you've copied your data over, you could (from WinXP) simply right-click your old Win98 drive, and "Format..."

- rp

[MDS]

If just transferring files you could just use it as the slave and copy them over but you can't copy software over it will have to be reinstalled. Just my .02c I would definitely partion that drive maybe 3 ways and you can do it from the xp install disk. I would hate to see how fraged a 200gig drive would be without partioning it into smaller section.

[anken]

Thank you for your input, rp. It's good to know that I can proceed the way I thought that I should be able to but wasn't sure.

MSD, I will patition that drive for sure. Defrag probably wouldn't work otherwise. Maybe later versions of Windows will be set up to cope with a large drive.

Had planned on buying a 120gb drive but got a good deal on the 200gb.