Question on installing Windows on a 2nd drive...

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Aelfgeft

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So I've been operating with a 20GB IDE hard drive and a 160GB SATA drive for a while. I have the Windows directory and swap file installed on the IDE and games and storage on the SATA drive. Now, it's long overdue time for a reinstall, especially since my IDE drive is beginning to cough and wheeze.

Now, I know of the problems with installing Windows XP on a SATA drive alone. I'm wondering if I can overcome this by NOT formatting my IDE drive, clearing the 160GB I have, formatting it, installing Windows on it while I have Windows running on my IDE drive, and then swap over when the installation is complete. Is this possible?
 
I'm not sure what problems you are expecting by installing on an SATA drive, but most of us have been doing that without issue for quite some time.

I'm always a fan of a fresh install, but if that's not what you want, You could Ghost the 20 GB drive to the 160 GB drive...and assuming you have the SATA drivers installed (or a chipset with native support), it should boot...maybe with a little help from the recovery console.
 
The issue I'm dreading is the Windows XP installation needing SATA drivers, and having to use a floppy drive in order to get them, otherwise the installation will claim there are no hard drives installed. Yes, I could go get a floppy drive for cheap, but it's one of those little pain in the ass things that will sit around and get forgotten.
 
Aelfgeft said:
The issue I'm dreading is the Windows XP installation needing SATA drivers, and having to use a floppy drive in order to get them, otherwise the installation will claim there are no hard drives installed. Yes, I could go get a floppy drive for cheap, but it's one of those little pain in the ass things that will sit around and get forgotten.
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That hasn't been an issue in quite sometime, since most chipsets now offer native support. Even if you were using an old, early AMD chipset that isn't directly supported, you can use NLite to add the drivers into your CD. Don't just assume because you have an SATA drive, you will need to load drivers for it. For example, none of the Intel chipsets ever needed drivers, unless you were using RAID functionality.
 
That appears to be a Via chipset, which I thought were dead and gone. Someone else will have to answer if that's natively supported or not. Or, you could simply try it now by booting off your XP CD.
 
If you install Windows the way you are describing you will likely end up with a dual boot. If you do end up with a dual boot the actual boot files (boot.ini, etc) will be on the drive with the first windows install, the IDE drive. Swap them (change your boot order) and I don't think you will be able to boot to windows from the Sata drive.
 
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