O/T - Third HDD and OS

[NachtPiloten]

Hey - currently have a two HDD two OS (XP Pro 32 and Win 7 Pro 64). The XP is on a HDD that is 7 years old and I am just a bit nervous. Just installed a new 500 gb hdd. Can I put XP pro 32 on this new drive and slowly migrate my files to it so when the older drive stops working I'll have all my files and programs saved? Oh just for information should I install XP Pro 32 or 64 on the new HDD?

[josepicos]

It's a risk...........you decide

[greycap.raf]

Yes you can. Just do it as three completely independent installs (plug out the other drives when installing if you want to be sure) so that nothing messes with anything else and by the time you have the new XP done you can throw the old one physically to the bin. You might even be able to mirror the old drive entirely onto the new one and be done with it once for all - if you do it and it blows right onto your face it wasn't me who said it! But going the orthodox way, of course you can. It'll take quite a bit of work to install all the programs (on the other hand you can skip the ones you never used after installing and trying them out to notice that they sucked) but copying the actual files over is a piece of cake, a time consuming one but still.

Whether you'll need 32 or 64 bit is up to the choice of preferring everything certainly working like it always did or being able to use more RAM. Personally I'd go the 32 bit route as during the nine years of using XP I've managed to run out of RAM exactly once and when it happened I had several 2048x2048 texture files with a couple of dozen layers each under construction. The ~3.25GB that 32 bit can cope with is a lot and then some for XP. And you'll have that W7 64 bit anyway so you can do the seriously heavy work with it if need arises.

[josepicos]

Yea, but save all the cfs3 related files!

[rbp71854]

A couple of alternatives to ponder would be:

A mirrored raid with the older drive.

Next would be the addition of an external hdd like WD MyBook ~$130 @walmart and genie backup http://www.genie9.com/home/Genie_Bac.../Overview.aspx ~$50

Format the WD removing the WD supplied backup software and use the genie back-up software to backup your computer system. Keep the WD offline except for when you do backups.

[hairyspin]

There's always drive imaging software: copy an image of the XP drive to the new HD, remove the old HD and use the new one as your XP drive. There's a number of drive imaging packages available, even some free ones. Acronis TrueImage seems well thought of (payware, 30-day free trial.....) but whatever you use, make sure you verify the result to make sure it's worked properly.

Device drivers for XP 64-bit are rare and getting rarer, so I'd suggest 32-bit XP Pro.