Clean install on new drive & keep old "just in case"

[amy55407]

I don't know why I wouldn't be able to do this but I wanted to check to be sure. I've done several reinstallations of Vista both to improve performance and after hard drive crashes. I want to see if I can hold off the temptation to buy a new laptop (I have a Thinkpad T60) by starting fresh. I'll probably just stick with Vista until the time comes that I do buy a new computer.

As I started the headache of figuring out what I have and what I want to reinstall, it occurred to me that I can just get a new hard drive and take out the old one. It could make the whole process faster and if I screw up, I'll have the old drive intact. I do back up my computer so I have that also.

I guess my main question is if my old drive will act as any other external drive? If I pop it into an external enclosure will I just be able to plug it in and transfer documents to the new one? Does it make any difference that it still has the OS and all my programs on it? I'm assuming they would just look like any other file at this point to the computer. My second question is, if after I've installed the OS on the new drive and for some reason screwed up could I just pop the old drive back in?

Thanks.

[ZaZ]

Yes, it should see your old drive as a regular external drive. If for some reason the new drive doesn't work out, you certainly can pop the old one back in and it should work as before.

[GomJabbar]

It seems I remember jdhurst saying something to the effect that you can't have two copies of Windows (XP anyway) with the same license on different drives in the same computer. I know there is no problem running different versions of Windows on different drives in the same computer because I have done that.

Maybe this will help some.
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/For ... fbb9ac3a24

[amy55407]

I think (hope) that it won't be recognized on the old drive as the OS when it's external and just like a bunch of files. I think I'll go ahead and get a 320gb or 500gb drive. It sounds like the WDs are good. I thought about upgrading to Windows 7 but I think I'll just keep this simple and stay with Vista for the moment.

[rkawakami]

I ended up trashing a perfectly good install of Windows XP when I cloned my wife's Gateway desktop hard drive onto a backup drive, and then kept that drive attached as the slave device on the primary IDE channel. Somehow during the next boot, Windows got confused as to which drive was which and the end result was that I had a Windows XP Welcome screen but no logon prompt on either drive. Had to completely re-install everything . That taught me never to have two bootable drives that were "identical" to each other installed in a system at the same time.

edit: I should note that I used Ghost 2003 to do this so it might be something unique to that program.

edit2: Maybe this article explains why my clone went wrong: http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm

[GomJabbar]

You could "probably" plug in the drive after Windows boots up, but I wouldn't try booting with both drives attached.

[amy55407]

Thanks for this important bit of info. I'll be sure to boot up before attaching the other drive. I understand it will "probably" be ok but it makes sense that it would.