Seoncd Hard Drive questions

onipar

onipar

Member
I recently purchased a new 500 GB hard drive and reinstalled Windows XP onto this new hard drive.

I installed my old 140GB hard drive into the second sata slot, and made sure to put it last in boot order. Everything is working fine. new hard drive is purring with a fresh OS install, and the second drive shows up under "my computer" as Drive E.

My question is this:

That old drive still has XP installed on it, as well as having about 80 GB filled with files and whatnot. I copied everything over to the new drive that I'd like to keep (I hope!).

So what do I do with the second drive? DO I reformat and completely erase it? Do I just leave it as is with XP installed on it and half the drive filled with backup files? Will leaving the drive as is slow the computer down at all?

Thanks for the input!
 
I would leave it as is for a while so you can make sure you've gotten everything you need. Then once you are sure you can wipe it. Leaving it as is wont hurt anything but you can turn it into additional storage or backup space.
 
A drive that small id leave it be....I use my drives as a back up incase I lose things I don't want lost.

I also leave 1 drive (my old 320GB) left as is incase my primary ever dies. I have a fully installed OS ready to go then (I update it upon hardware changes)
 
Great, thanks for the feedback.

Yeah, i was mostly concerned that having the OS installed in the second drive would mess with the system. But as long as it doesn't, I'll leave it as is.

Considering I had that 145 GB drive for 4 years and only filled half of it, I'm not too concerned about space with the new 500 GB installed.

The tutorial I had been following suggested buying 2 new hard drives, taking the old one out intact and storing it away as a backup, and using the second new drive to save "system snapshots" using backup software.

I was a little too cheap to buy another new drive, but I may do the snapshot thing using my older drive since there's space.

DO you know of any reliable free system snapshot applications? The one they recommended in the tutorial costs $50.
 
That program worked out pretty well. I used it to take a snapshot of my C drive and saved it to my E drive.

The instructions to set up a weekly task (so it would backup on its own) was a little confusing, so I'll probably just do it manually every so often.

Thanks again for the help, all.
 
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