Hello...I wasn't quite sure which forum to post to.I want to transfer Xp Home and my files to a new HD.My old one is failing.Can a person just use the software that comes with the new HD and simply transfer the OS?.Also I seen somewhere that their might be a problem when you transfer the OS between a OEM HD and a retail HD.Is this going to be a problem?.I have a OEM HD.I was going to buy a retail HD.I don't have an XP Home CD.I only have a recovery CD.I have a Maxtor 4D040H2 40GB, 5400 RPM, Ultra-ATA/100 Hard drive.I will be replacing this with another Maxtor HD.Thanks in advance for any help I get...Riddle.

Maxtor gives you a cd that allows cloning an old hd to the new one. Install the new one as the master and the old as a slave. Change the jumpers on the old one to slave. Then boot from the cd and follow the menu.

The best advice i can give you is to get hold of a copied version of xp home and use your key and do a proper reinstall, its still legit, its exactly what they do in pc repair shops! Q-TEC 550 Watt PSU MSI VIA KT4AV-L 2800+ Barton 512 DDR333 GeForce4 Ti 4200 128Mb Aero 7 Lite 80Gb Samsung ATA133 HDD 120Gb WD ATA100 HDD LiteOn LDW-851S LiteOn LTR-52246S

Or use ghost disk to disk if you have it.

I'm gonna jump on this thread because I have a similar problem. Here's the deal. I've got a 20G hard drive on a Dell laptop that's full. I've got an 80G as a replacement, but I want to swap disks and find that I have the same computer, except 60G more space. Running XP Pro, and many other apps. Some are propietary so what do I use and how do I go about it? Ps. If you can't tell, I know just enough about computers to be really dangerous. Details please. Thanks PPs. Here's my guess. Get a USB2.0 adapter for the new hard drive. Run Ghost to make a copy of the old drive on to the new drive. Remove the old drive and move new drive into the computer. Question: Will this work? Will I have disk naming problems? (Will it see the new drive as C:?) Will my programs run? If This isn't the correct procedure, what is? Thanks for all your help.

XpUser contacted me the other day as he was trying to ghost to a usb external and it wouldn't work. Don't know what he did to resolve it. Ghost won't give you a bootable hd in the partition copy. It must be disk to disk. Not familiar with laptops. You need to get the new hd on the ide 0 as a slave or on ide 1 as the secondary master. Then disk to disk in ghost from the old one to the new one. Hope this helps.