[mlwjackson]

I purchased an upgrade copy of windows 7 through a educator's special pricing deal. I want to install it but I want to upgrade my hard drive. I currently have XP loaded on an IDE drive formated in FAT. I would like to upgrade to a larger drive formated in NTFS.

I have an extra bay open. Can I install a new SATA drive as my master drive and make the old drive a slave and still get the system to load the new OS?

[Advertisements]

The steps you are describing are not in the right order.
First install the SATA drive and then what you will have to do is Partition it and format it using FAT
Then here is the tricky part...you need to clone your original drive over to the SATA drive.
Once that is done then you would need to change the boot sequence in your BIOS to boot to the SATA drive as primary. To then change FAT to NTFS try using this topic HERE from Microsoft
At this point I would suggest making sure everything in your system and all your programs are compatible with Win7 by going to the Windows Upgrade Adviser.
Once this is all completed then you can Upgrade to Win7 32 bit with no problems.
Let us know how everything works out for you.

Edited by rshaffer61, 15 January 2010 - 01:47 PM.

[rshaffer61]

The steps you are describing are not in the right order.
First install the SATA drive and then what you will have to do is Partition it and format it using FAT
Then here is the tricky part...you need to clone your original drive over to the SATA drive.
Once that is done then you would need to change the boot sequence in your BIOS to boot to the SATA drive as primary. To then change FAT to NTFS try using this topic HERE from Microsoft
At this point I would suggest making sure everything in your system and all your programs are compatible with Win7 by going to the Windows Upgrade Adviser.
Once this is all completed then you can Upgrade to Win7 32 bit with no problems.
Let us know how everything works out for you.

Edited by rshaffer61, 15 January 2010 - 01:47 PM.