Fake XP errors (maybe not)?

[Chewy]

for this operation I would suggest just temporarily unhooking your burner and plugging the new hard drive in as master for that channel(the secondary)
will your bios see it?

[drfsupercenter]

It may, but why would I need to do that?

[Chewy]

after you hook it up then check that bios is seeing it at post, we want all three hard drives up at once for the data transfer, right?

[drfsupercenter]

Sure,

How do I partition it, that's my main question.

And two, what about that virus, what will happen with that... last thing I want is another infected drive.

And could I just unplug my CD burner (slave) or does it have to be the DVD burner (master)?

[Chewy]

it's up to you to decide if you trust your present install to be clean or not,
all I want to do is partition the new drive and load the data on a data partition.

this way you have plenty of time to get it right, I usually preload drives this way myself.

I just have the new drive sitting in an open cavity inside(on top of an optical) or beside the case.

[drfsupercenter]

OK, but I mean... say one of my files is infected, couldn't it just start spreading around again?

And you still gotta help me partition.

[Chewy]

When you get it hooked up and boot the computer
right click on my computer/manage/disk management

windows should see it and offer to set it up, skip the dynamic volume part

now we create a primary partition, and set size to 20-40Gigs, windows will format ntfs(slow), now make it active, right click? Now make an extended partition with the rest and a logical drive in that partition. Format ntfs(fast is ok). Now you have 2 new partitions. Load data on the big one, leave the small one alone. For the file transfers to work the best and fastest we want
this new drive on a seperate cable by itself. Don't argue about it, I have done it scores of times and it's much faster.

when you have to transfer very large data banks you figure out the fastest way(pre gigabit networking)

[drfsupercenter]

So what about installing Windows?

[Chewy]

when you're done in disk management you should have something similar

[drfsupercenter]

Which is the drive that was formatted?

[Chewy]

all 4 partitions have been formated, they would just show as space otherwise.
Disk 1 used to be my boot drive till I got the faster small drive.

You'll install windows after the data transfer, but then we have to unhook both old drives.
The 60 you'll pull out, the 160 you'll just leave disconnected temporarily, of course you'll have to
change the new drive to master on the primary and hook your burner back up so we can boot to it and load windows.

[drfsupercenter]

So what I do is:
1. Unhook my DVD-RW drive, and put the 200GB drive in its place
2. Open Computer Management, make a 30GB partition on the new drive
3. Partition the rest of the drive
4. Move the data onto the new drive
5. Switch drives around, and reformat the 160GB drive, install Windows on the 30GB partition on the new drive

Is that correct?

[Chewy]

So what I do is:
1. Unhook my DVD-RW drive, and put the 200GB drive in its place
2. Open Computer Management, make a 30GB partition on the new drive
mark it active and format
3. Partition the rest of the drive and format
4. Move the data onto the new drive
5. Switch drives around, and reformat the 160GB drive(not yet), install Windows on the 30GB partition on the new drive(now you can wipe old drive)

Is that correct?

nope, go slow and methodical, take notes whatever,

whatever you do when you go to install windows make sure that the new drive is the ONLY drive connected.

on this test 100 is passing, anything else don't get it

[drfsupercenter]

OK, what exactly happens when there are two partitions on one drive, does it show as two drives?

And what do you mean mark active?

[Chewy]

each partition gets a drive letter and shows as seperate drives in my computer, marking active is essential cause with a partition presetup like this windows xp will load to it but not boot on it's own.
I just deleted the partition and did a quick format on that old system partition(it was empty)

this step is essential(active part)