Hello people. Strangest thing happened yesterday. My kid tampered about with my computer, and shut it off by just pulling the plug. When I rebooted, my bios all of a sudden detected a new hd, which I of course never installed. I didn't think too much of it, until I started playing a game of snooker, and this monitor tool I have goes berserk because my cpu is on 70 degrees celsius heat. Apart from that, my hdd is all of a sudden making this strange strange noise. To cut a long story short: I will probably buy a new system, since I already wanted to do this for a longer time. My question: my current hdd is partitioned in a c: and d: part. Total physical size is 80 GB. Say I want to have a 300GB drive in my new system. Is it in any way possible to copy all the information of my current drive to my new drive, so it will boot up w/o me losing any information? If so, how do I go about things? Do I need to partition the new HDD in the same way, and copy the D: contents to the "new" D: drive? What more pitfalls are there? I do realize that I might get some driver problems, it is because of this that I will probably buy a new case, motherboard, but plug in my old network card, vga-card, and so on. Thanks in advance for your answers. Kind regards, Alain

The answer to your question is YES but this same question is being asked on this board on almost a daily basis ! No disrespect intended but it does start to get a bit tedious churning out the same reply time after time so I may I suggest you either do a search or simply scroll down through a couple of days posts to find out what you need to know. If you have subsequent problems by all means come back and I'm sure we'll all be happy to assist. Good luck

am0751, seems to me it should work fine so long as the drive itself hasn't been damaged. Something worth looking into is to set your current drive as a slave and let your new one be the master. The new master will control the OS in case you wanna change it and all your old data will still be there when you want it. HTH. Ed in Texas.

I didn;t search, came in this morning @ my job, and never thought about plowing through previous messages. Mea culpa. Thanks for the answer anyway.

If I understand your post you want to Clone you current drive to a new one and put the new drive in a new tower with new MOBO and other hardware. If that is the case then this will not work as XP does not like a major hardware change and will not boot in a totally new environment, also, there is the MS activation to deal with.

Hi Alain, I have done this on previous systems. BAsically what I did was, took the hard drive out from the old system and installed it in the available tray on the new system. I ended up having two hard drives. I like this so that in the event I detect my system is acting squirley, then all I have to do is take the important stuff that's on the new drive and copy it to the old drive. Let me know what you decide. Veets

Hi FJB, Good point! Actually, I thought Alain just wanted to copy files over, such as Word docs, etc. Veets