Going from XP to Win 7? Maybe not....

[Reece]

What I am going to do is install a SATA removable drive bay (2 of actually so I get 2 drive carriers), then buy a new HDD then I can just pull out and plug in between systems till I'm happy with Win 7 setup!!

[Arclight]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

That's what I'm saying, right? Just add a new HD, and load the full version of Win7. You don't need to back anything from your original HD, as longam says, you can still access the files.

Some long time back, on my old PC, my Windows was corrupted and the PC would not boot up. Tried a lot of things, but it would not boot up. So I bought a new, and much larger, HD, made it the master and slaved the original with all my files, and installed XP on the new HD. Computer worked great, all the programs on the old HD with corrupted Windows worked fine.

This is what I did recently; add in another SATA drive, install on that. If I select the old drive as #1 boot priority in BIOS, I can still boot the old one, you don't nescesarily have to swap connections like mentioned before. In short: sure, that works.

Originally Posted by Reece

What I am going to do is install a SATA removable drive bay (2 of actually so I get 2 drive carriers), then buy a new HDD then I can just pull out and plug in between systems till I'm happy with Win 7 setup!!

Got 2 of those as well, though they house a RAID array; was more intended as expansion because I ran out of bays. Works fine, but rigging up a fan or getting a bay with one is recommended; heat builds up in there.

Mounting those things in the optical drive bays causes a bit of vibration though, but that may be due to my particular case. Need to improvise something to reduce it.

[CaptainHaplo]

I run one main drive - in 2 partitions. I have a second drive devoted purely for copies of critical data.

So my machine shows 3 hd's in windows. If something I know is critical, I manually copy it over. This is my game machiine, so very little is truly critical on it, but stuff like pictures, a few docs, etc.

When its needed, its format and reinstall - all my needed stuff is already there. It also makes formats fast - because I can make sure all the necessary drivers and updates are downloaded and on that second drive, ready to be installed.

[longam]

Originally Posted by Arclight

This is what I did recently; add in another SATA drive, install on that. If I select the old drive as #1 boot priority in BIOS, I can still boot the old one, you don't nescesarily have to swap connections like mentioned before. In short: sure, that works.

I have done the BIOS switch on ASUS boards, but for some reason this Dell board doesn't support it.