[maggieh]

Hi, My daughter gave me a newer computer than mine. My sons friend basically built mine from an older Sony Vaio. It did have a new hard drive installed. He put a ghost drive on this hard drive, so it is drive C and drive D, with drive D being storage.
I want to wipe the C drive with loosing what is on the D portion of the drive. I would then like to put this drive in the one my daughter gave me and reformat it with Windows XP and use her drive for storage, having two completely hard drives.

I don't know if one has to be the master and one the slave or if it can just be put in as storage. Once I move what is one the D drive from my computer to her reformated disk that has been added back in, I would renew the C drive and D drive on my computer (the one she gave me). Gee, I hope this makes sense. I am not very computer smart. I did add a CD drive on mine years ago but had great directions from Gateway.

I cannot move the files to another location as my DVD/CD player and recorder has quit on this one (my older one.) I was doing that when it quit. That is why I am trying to save the D drive until stuff can be moved to the empty reformatted disk that is in my daughters. I do have all the disks.

Hope someone can help me and it would have to be kept kind of simple. I am on disability and am not able to pay to have this done. My son's friend that did this to start with is not around. Thanks to anyone who can help. Maggie

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Ouch! - my head is spinning! I can't follow what it is you're trying to accomplish, but I can tell you most definitely that if you 'wipe' the C: drive it will in no way affect the D: drive.

[phillipcorcoran]

Ouch! - my head is spinning! I can't follow what it is you're trying to accomplish, but I can tell you most definitely that if you 'wipe' the C: drive it will in no way affect the D: drive.

[maggieh]

Mine too. LOL I have a partitioned drive. I want to wipe the C part of the drive, not the D part that has all my backups. Glad to know I will not loose that drive. My problem is, I do not know how to wipe the C part of the drive. I DO NOT want to format it as it is going into another computer and will be formatted there.

Hope you can help with the wiping part.

Thanks for your reply and trying to help...Maggie

[123Runner]

I had to dig through this a few times.

I think you lost me also.
If I follow this correctly you want the hard drive from your old computer placed in the new computer.
You want to install XP on that drive AND not lose what is on the D partition.
You then want to place the hard drive that is from the new computer as a slave (2nd physical drive) in the new computer.
You want to format the (now) slave drive and put your D drive data on it.

Why do you want to go through all this work If the new computer is operational? I assume it is.
Does this new computer boot up and run?
What is the OS on this computer.

I DO NOT want to format it as it is going into another computer and will be formatted there.

You answered your own question.
Place the drive in the other computer. Boot from the XP cd.

Just read each question during the install very carefully so that you do not format the entire drive.

[maggieh]

I think you've got it. Neither computer is new. The one my daughter gave me is just quite a bit newer than mine. It is a Dell and in the box she sent it in. I haven't taken it out. It is XP also. The reason I was going to switch the hard drives is that my hard drive is newer though my whole system is older. It was in storage quite a while (long story) and the hard drive went. So, I bought a new hard drive and my sons friend just put it in another computer and added some more memory and a video card. This is an old Sony Vio that did belong to his dad, not even my orginal old one that was a Gateway. I also figured two hard drives would just be more storage. I didn't know if I had to make the second one a slave or not. I don't know a whole lot about the workings of computers, as I guess you can tell.

The computer my daughter sent me works fine. But, I was told by a few people that I couldn't just put my hard drive in her computer as I would run into a big mess with drivers, etc. I need all my information on my D drive on the one she gave me.
I plan to scrap mine if I ever get everything on hers. I have no way to download the D drive on mine.

I have a lot of stuff saved to my hard drive as my son spent 5 months here with me due to my illness and hogged my Internet with his lap top most of the time. So, I didn't get a lot downloaded to disks, then the burner quit. I have a lot of pictures, teaching videos for art, art patterns, PSP, embroidery designs for sewing machine along with lessons along with videos for that whole set up. I would loose a lot that I can't get back. A lot of this stuff is downloaded from the web and is only on to get for a short time before it is taken off.

Sorry I can't explain better....Maggie