PC techie help needed!
 

I am a PC novice...so please stay with me...

I've been thinking about ungrading my (30GB) hard drive over the past couple of weeks, due to it becoming rammed to the rafters due to my love of games and surfing etc.

Also...it now appears to have become 'infected' by a load of crap/spam that has probably come from the web (despite running SP2 and AVG).

So...in an aim to kill 2 birds with one stone, the questions is, how easy is it remove the old drive, and replace it with another (120GB)? I have done a little research into it and it seems feasible. The bit that is a little confusing is when things like partitioning, bios and disc formatting are mentioned! I guess that once I get into it, it will become a little self-explanitory...

I have the windows XP CD here etc...and to be honest, apart from gaming and surfing, it is used for very little else (not for work etc), so I'm not even sure if I need to do anything in terms of backing up...as I have nothing to lose on the machine!

Any obvious pointers/step-by-step guides before I dive in:ninja::puzzled:

Upgrade
 

Provided you've got your discs, ie a boot up disc (if you need one for XP), your XP disc and your driver discs for any hardware attached, it is quite simple to upgrade. With a new drive you will have to FDISK it first to create the DOS partitions. It sounds complicated but is quite simple to do. The disc will then need to be formatted. Then off you go with your installation of XP. If you have DriveImage or similar software you can actaully make a direct image of your old drive without having to do the above. You sometimes get it bundled with the motherboard.

This explains about FDISK

http://home7.inet.tele.dk/batfiles/m...htm&fdisk1.htm

If you are in the market for a new drive then ALDI, yes ALDI, have a 250gb Western drive on sale at the moment for £79.99. Look in the Specila Buys section.

http://uk.aldi.com/

As allready mentioned before to other bods.
If you have nothing important to save etc, and don't mind losing other bits etc, just start a fresh.
stick in a new drive( make sure it's set as master or single drive on back of drive), bios should pick up an IDE based drive straight away, if bios is on auto detect drive setting that is, otherwise choose auto detect.
Also make sure that bios is set to read CDROM drive first, to ensure you can boot properly from the CD.
Save bios settings.
reboot the PC, and stick in the XP disk, rest is self explanatory.
unless you are into lots of partitions etc, stick with just one, and let XP do its work.
just a brief overview, if you need more in depth info, let me know.

any probs, give me a call mate.

cheers
robin

Quick tip for XP users.
you don't need to fdisk a new drive prior to intsalling XP.
XP will let you create, partitions/delete them etc, format said partitions etc during setup.
unless your are using complicated dual boot, multi OS installs or just being difficult let XP do the work.
Best option for an easy upgrade.

Assuming you don't need to backup, firstly you don't say what model your machine is, or what the BIOS is, but you will need to ensure your machine can access a drive of 120Gb etc, there are ways and means around this, but assuming your machine is less than 5 years old it should be OK.

Remove the old drive, there should be a label on there which will have the drive setup as either a master, slave or cable select (CS), as it's your only drive it should be master. Install the new drive, and make sure the jumper setting matches the old drive (master etc)

Turn the PC on and enter the BIOS, you should see your new drive in the hard disk config, there may well be the option to set the boot order of your machine, if so set your machine to boot from CD first, then hard disk. Insert your Windows XP CD, and reboot. The PC should now boot to CD and installation wizard will guide you through the rest of the process.

Depending if the CD is an original, not a recovery disk, there will be the option to do a custom install, don't be afraid, this will walk you through the likes or partitioning your drive. I'd be tempted to have more than one partition, I have 3 on my 180Gb drive, C: 10Gb, D: 40Gb, E: 130Gb c: for the OS d: for games e: for music and when rendering DVD's etc. You could probably get away with 2 c: d:

Windows XP should have pretty much all of the drivers you will need, as long as you make a note of any drivers you might need, mainly being Video card, sounds card, network card, you should have a pretty good chance of doing this without too much trouble.

Red SPS
 

Thanks for the tip re XP. I'm a ME user so a little behind the times.

Cheers for the advice guys...as usual its made to sound soooo easy!

Well, I'm gonna have a stab after i finished work tonight.

So...summing up the above (please correct of wrong!):

Turn off PC
Remove old drive (noting cables etc)
Install new drive noting master/slave settings/cables etc.
Turn on PC

Now...at this point it becomes a little confusing for me. Will BIOS start automatically or do I still have to hit Delete?

When you mention 'boot from the CD'..uhm...which CD is this exactly, the Windows XP CD or should I have something else ready?

:borg:

Just a thought - most modern PC's seem to able to accomadate two hard drives.

I kept my old 80Gb HD from my dead PC and simply shoved it into my new desktop PC - I guess there might be a drawback somewhere on some machines but to my mind why waste a drive when at the most all you might need are data and power cables???

ps - is static still a problem??? - I always thought touching a radiator or grounding oneself always used to be 'de rigour'

good luck - Frank

Booting from CD
 

You will have to go into the BIOS and change the boot up sequence. Make the first boot device your CD rom, your second your IDE hard drive and you can delete the A: drive from the boot up sequence.

Save your settings and restart the PC with the XP disc in the drive. From what Red SPS says you should then just have to follow as XP instructs you. Good luck.

On most PC's at boot time there will be a brief time to access the BIOS - when the memory counts up etc, usually you hit the delete key, possibly F1, F2, or F10 depending on what your machine is.

You will see a menu driven system of either one page or multiple pages depending on BIOS, it will be listed as boot order, or boot sequence, and yes it's the XP CD you need to use.