I am going to be doing an almost complete rebuild of my pc in the coming weeks. My 3.5 year old rig I have now contains 2 PATA interface barracudas that i want to carry over into my new build so save some bucks. I have around 40GB of music files on one of the drives that I don't want to lose however during the rebuild, but I want to be able to do a clean install of Windows XP when I fire up the new build. Is there anyway to carry over the music files without spending a ton of money on an external drive or some program? I have a limited budget so I cant spend much money trying to do this. The drives are not setup in a RAID configuration. Feel free to shoot any other questions at me. Thanks for any advice you can give.

you have 2 pata drives right, i assume that 1 has your current os and 1 is you storage drive where your music is? unplug both, put your original OS drive in your new rig and do the reformat/install of XP, when that is complete you should be able then to just plug the second drive back in, as secondary drive, and XP should see the drive and nothing lost.

Hi Dmeyer,

So you have two drives? How big is the one your wanting to put your OS onto and how big is the second drive? - If the back ups can fit on both of the drives *independantly* then you should be just fine ...

There is no reason why you cant back up what you want onto the second drive. Format the first one and install you OS, copy what you want back to the first drive, then finally format the second drive.

This will ensure a pretty clean format, only the files that you would be backing up will be present (get what you want and little else)

Hope this answers your question.

My first and original drive is an 80gb barracuda and I bought another one a few months ago because my 80gb was getting full, the newer one is 120gb. All of my music is on my original drive, the 80gb one, and the newer drive is just a slave with a couple of games installed on it so far. How does one go about moving data from one drive to another? is it as simple as a copy and paste deal? Sorry if it seems like a dumb question.

It is indeed just a simple copy and paste deal. You should see both drives as separate drive letters in windows explorer.

-TyShoe

Well, while you still can, move all the files you want to keep by copying off the 80GB and pasting them onto the 120GB. When you rebuild, put the 80GB as Master and install XP.

alright thanks guys, I will just copy and paste the files before I do my new build, thanks for the speedy replies.