Dell 8200 System. Hard drive is putting out error code at start up detecting out of parameter and to hit F1 to continue.. it does and runs fine till next start up. Dell has shipped a new hard drive (warrenty), I told them I could install. Can I put this in as a second drive, copy the entire C drive over to this new drive, uninstall the original hard drive and hopefully let windows recognize it as the new C drive without having to reinstall all my programs?????

You would have to have the drive primary [master] in the system. Make the installed drive slave. Boot up on a 98 boot disk containing fdisk, xcopy and format. Fdisk the new drive and format c: /s [actual command]. Then use xcopy to copy the contents of the slave drive to the primary. Remove the slave and reboot. You should be fine.

hello you should use norton ghost or drive image to clone the drive.with cloneing a hard drive useing ghost you dont even need to do fdisk or format. it dose this as it clones the old drive to the new one you will still need to make the new drive a slave useing th jumpers to do this. after cloneing is complet shut off computer dont reboot after clone completion as this can cause problems. than make new hd master remove old hd. if you wish to use old drive allso format it first.

I had the same problem with my Dell 8200. I bought a new hard drive and a RAID controller and configured it for mirror, copied all files. Trouble is, its showing up as one drive and the disk size is of the larger drive. I made sure bios settings are correct. It also made a mess in the Windows history file, made many duplicate copies, and as such is now unfragmentable, or scannable, keep getting pathname too long. Runs fine though, if a little slow. Im thinking to take out the old drive and try to run the larger, newer one.