Removing Windows XP

[Bo Aakerstrom]

I have tried to find out how to remove XP from a hard drive which used to be my main drive but I have installed a SATA drive with larger capacity.

There is a lot of files on there which I need to have available (which are backed up but it would be great to not have to reformat and start from scratch).

There are plenty of info regarding how to remove it and revert to an earlier Windows OS, but as this is not what I want to do I thought it would be good to ask here before I start tampering with it!

[terrie]

bo: There is a lot of files on there which I need to have available (which are backed up but it would be great to not have to reformat and start from scratch).I *think* that if you install the drive in you system, it won't be seen as the primary/boot drive--you may need to fiddle with the master/slave switches first--and you should be able to just access the files normally--as data...

What about buying a hard drive enclosure and sticking the drive in it?

Terrie

[Michael Rowley]

Bo:

I have tried to find out how to remove XP from a hard drive which used to be my main drive but I have installed a SATA drive with larger capacity

If XP was used to upgrade an earlier version of Windows (2000?), you cannot remove (it said when I tried).

[Steve Rindsberg]

In other words, your new drive is the Windows drive now and you just want to have the old drive's files available?

Simplest would be to install it as a secondary drive or in an external case as Terrie's suggested and ignore the fact that there are still some Windows files there. The new version of Windows won't use them.

[Hugh Wyn Griffith]

As others say, including Steve, but note that copying will not install applications (generally true although my Off Line Reader is an exception since it does not reauire the registry <g>) so while you can copy over data files they may have made, or images etc, you would have to install the applications on the new drive in the usual way.

Having said that there are some utilities that claim to be able to do it but I've no experience of them and in general people seem sceptical of them.

[Bo Aakerstrom]

The drive does indeed live in an external enclosure nowadays as a "slave".
It was originally a fresh install and I only want to keep the data, not anything else.
I was only trying to recover some space but it might not be worthwhile to tamper too much with it since it works fine as it is!

[Hugh Wyn Griffith]

Without sight of the contents tree, I would see no harm in just deleting the folders that don't contain the data files. Although perhaps transferring the data files to a CD/DVD and seeing if they can be retrieved from that would be a prudent action first?

[dthomsen8]

Without sight of the contents tree, I would see no harm in just deleting the folders that don't contain the data files. Although perhaps transferring the data files to a CD/DVD and seeing if they can be retrieved from that would be a prudent action first?

That sounds good to me.

However, we have to beware of the desire to reclaim disk space when it is not really needed. Many of us started with a PC with limited disk space, perhaps only a few megabytes, and haven't adjusted to many gigabyte drives.

[Hugh Wyn Griffith]

Perfectly correct although I'd be wary of having an inactive operating system just sitting there in the background.

It would make sense to copy off all wanted files and then reformat the drive to be used for backup (and chkdsk and check SMART on it) before using it as a backup drive.

But that's just my thinking.