New Hard Drive

[tprime]

I just purchased a 250 gig maxtor and windows xp pro upgrade. I currently have an 80 gig with windows xp home installed on it. I would like to install windows xp pro on the new hard drive and then be able to copy files from my 80 gig to the 250 gig. I have installed the new hard drive and made the 250 gig master and the 80 gig slave and have verified this in my bios.
What I'm unclear on is how do I install this on the new hard drive. Was thinking maybe I have to put my xp disc in and set the boot sequence to boot my cd before floppy? Not sure.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[slash]

Set your bios to boot from the cdrom before it boots from your hard drive, the floppy boot order shouldn't matter(make sure you press enter when the boot screen says boot from cdrom). When Xp asks where to install make sure your 250 gig hard drive is what is selected. Personally I would install the 250 gig as a slave or on another ide channel, copy your files to it and then format and install XP on the 80 gig, then you can save all your files on the 250 gig and if the 80 crashes or needs to be reformatted you don't have to worry about backing up your files. Also I'd recommend making a image of your OS once you have installed the basic programas and devices, many people use norton ghost or Acronis disk image to do this. It is much quicker to re image your OS than it is to reinstall. A final note is I would back up all files to cdr or dvdr before you try anything, that way if something goes wrong you don't lose your data( I learned the hard way!). Many members of this board are way above my skill level so if I am in error please correct. Best of luck.

[Carnival Forces]

slash is pretty much right.

why do you want XP on the 250GB HDD? if you do insist on installing it there, even if you install on the 80, make sure you partition your HDD nicely

i.e. 8GB for Windows, 1GB (or 512MB or whatever is appropriate, see the sticky) for your paging file, and the rest however you want (maybe 50 for songs, another 8 or so for games, etc. etc.)

[Fint]

There are very few difference between XP Home and XP Pro, except for some minor networking things (can't join a domain, etc). Make sure you don't expect wizz-bang new things or faster performance from XP Pro.