I recently acquired a used computer and I want to get a new hard disk for it because a) it's too small and b) the person who gave it to me said it was unreliable I've been looking around ebay and others for a new drive and I want one with windows XP already on it though I have not found one. failing that, i was wondering how to get the OS onto the blank drive. Do i just drag&drop everything over and switch the boot drive or is there something else? Help on finding a drive w/ XP on it or how to switch?

First of all, taking a hard drive from another computer will not work for you unless it happens to be an exact computer. With that in mind, you will need to copy your old hard drive onto a new one, providing the old one is not too corrupt to work. To do that, go here and get an answer : http://www.computing.net/answers/ha... Good Luck Smitty

Note that you have to 'clone' the old drive to the new one. You cannot just copy all the files over, because there is data on the drive that is not copyable.

Thank you very much for the advice How would I go about cloning a drive?

The top manufacturers like Western Digital and Seagate provide tools on their website for this purpose.