Hi my hard drive has been performing quite slowly lately so I've decided to format. I just had one question. I know XP Pro is better but I am going to be putting Win Xp Home on the drive. It's a 40GB. I have a 160GB drive also with XP Pro installed on it already. If I make my 40GB the drive with the OS files installed on it, will I lose access or compatibility or whatever to my 160GB with XP Pro? I really don't want to dual boot. Any help would be appreciated!

You should not have a problem as long as the 40GB is your first boot device and your second hard drive is not on the list. Go to your BIOS and make sure you 1st device is CD or floppy (what ever you prefer) and second is the 40GB (should be the master) IDE-0 or IDE-1 depending on your BIOS. there should be no others. I had XP Pro on my master and 98 on my secondary while I transfered files booted with out a problem.

Set the 40Gig as Primary Master, and the current XP-Pro drive as Primary Slave. Install XP to Primary (40gig drive) - usual CD boot or the floppies routine... The default location (offered) will be c:\winnt - which is what you want. The boot-menu via XP-Home on 40gig Master will not show any references to the XP-Pro installation - although it's obviously still there. If you want to be able to boot to it, then it's not hard to arrange it; all you do is add a reference to it in the boot.ini (on the 40Gig drive). Otherwise you will be able to access the contents of the 160Gig drive as per norm. Until you delete the XP-Pro installation on the 160Gig drive, it's possible to restore/reset it as the boot-drive... But then you would not have access to XP-Pro; although again a line in the XP-Pro boot.ini would be all that's required to boot to XP-home... Personally if not setting hard-drive as first in the boot-sequence then I'd set the floppy as second option (rather than CD)...

trvlr you must be old school like me I have a floppy on my system but if you look at most new systems, they do not have one. So CD has been typical for my setups as the systems I put together have no floppy. And yes after your done loading the O.S. it's best to set your HD as the first boot device, I go one step further and make it the only boot device.

true - I guess my years is showing... Not having a new/current system I guess I'm a little out touch with some of the latest offerings/changes? Although in my local PC stores the desktops do still have a floppy-drive.

Guess what i had a problem and it ended up being that my second disk was unreadable and when i converted it, i lost all data - thanks a lot for the mis information!!

hakoreh21 What's this all about??? Don't see any references 'here' to converting a drive - nor any input from you initially???