Adding hard drive to a PC.....

[Speeddog]

Make note of all the drive letters.

What could go wrong? 

Drive letters will be noted. 

Yeah, what could go wrong?

[erkishhorde]

Make note of all the drive letters.

What could go wrong?  

Bahaha!


When DP says to make note of all drive letters, after repartition the old drive, you want to set their letters back to whatever they were. So even though you only have 2 partitions, you want XP on partition E.

Yeah, last step would be to move all your docs that you imaging back onto the old drive onto the external so that your OS has even more space to play. You'll also want to reassign the default location of your My Documents to the external drive. You'll probably want to sift through the Program Files folder to find the actual data files like models that you were working on if you want optimize that space too. It'll make it more convenient when you upgrade later too so that you don't have to sift through them later. The actual Program Files folder can't be moved to the external though. It would probably break most of the programs if you did.

[herm]

True, BUT! all of the registry errors and artifacts from use will still be there. Executing ANY type of program creates registry entries. After a few months/years of this your PC will slow down. You can use an application like Ccleaner to clean out these entries but if you don't know what you're doing it can cause bigger problems.

A fresh install is ALWAYS faster than an existing, well used, install.

* a web server is not accessed/used the same as a "user" machine. If we were dealing with a website hosting server I would also recommend imaging/duplicating.

Unless he already has the knowledge, re-install would be more simple/effective then imaging.

Princess Bride - Battle of Wits

couldn't resist

[Veloce-Fino]

This thread has too many computer experts.  

[
couldn't resist

Hahahah.. perfect use.

[derby]

Make note of all the drive letters.

What could go wrong? 

Drive letters will be noted. 

Yeah, what could go wrong?

nt doesn't use drive letters for locating the os, it uses an ARC path noting where the system is installed. if you change your partition structure, you're going to have to manually change the ARC path in the boot.ini.

[Speeddog]

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition"/fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINNT="Windows NT Workstation Version 4.00"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINNT="Windows NT Workstation Version 4.00 [VGA mode]" /basevideo /sos

This is how it is now.

[erkishhorde]

Any better now?