2nd harddisk - moving dual boot to Vista

MAJJ

i Folks,

Everything is coming together for me - TV, speakers are here and av amp to arrive next week. Bluetooth keyboard on the way and now I want to set up my machine properly and long term. I suspect things may go down hill without some help!!

Currently on my HTPC Medion 8818 - I have XP MCE2005 on C: and installed Vista on . Formats - C: is FAT and is NTFS.

I intend on putting the the machine in another room and threading through the required wires into the av amp etc. Before I do all that I want to remove XP MCE2005 and make Vista the sole OS.

I intend on getting a 2nd hard disk probably a 500GB or 750GB. Thus I will have 2 drives - 320 and 750.

I know the above isn't a trivial topic and once I do all the above and have reinstalled and have a stable setup. I want to ensure that I can recover the machine i.e. the OS setup with drivers s/w and also music/films/my data. I intend on getting Ghost or Acronis and creating an image to use as a fall back - have only read about this. Don't RAID is a suitable option for me due to disk sizes.

I have the suppiled App Support disk, I have the XPMCE2005 recovery disk and I have the Vista upgrade disk. I also have an external drive to back up my data before I begin.

I know some of the theory of all the above and need someone to steer me in the right direction.

Can someone please give me a highlevel guide on how I can achieve the above. What I will do then is break it up and tackle it piece by piece. But to have my plans checked in advance would be great and for me highly necessary:)

This is how I may approach things.

I see the tasks as installing the second hard disk and having it visible to the current setup. I have read posts here on that. I will get a sata cable and should be ok with the rest.

I think maybe my best bet is to put the Visa on new larger drive and set up a partition of maybe 40GB for the OS and programs, remainder for recordings and maybe used the other disk as a back up for disk one.

Hope someone can advise?

I'll stop here probably should have stopped way back. Thanks for your time.

Thanks,
majj

MAJJ

Hi Folks,

One more try - can anyone advise? Even on subsets of the topic?

Thanks in advance,
majj

SouperComputer

Im not 100% sure what you are asking, but HTH

Id reccomend Acronis over ghost for a number of reasons, primarily stability. TBH, it not worth your time backing up the media. You could soft-raid some partitons across the two drives, but TBH, again, its not worth your time.

The best thing about acronis is the abiliy to make incremental and differential images, snapshots if you will. This is a mega benefit with a HTPC as invaiably you will insatll new cool software that breaks somthing. You can also setup a hidden partition on a drive and bootup into a recovery mode where you can restore a particualr snapshot.

How much music/videos do you have? Personally, I'd split the media from the OS. Maybe take the 750gB and put the OS and media in separate partions and put the images on the 350GB. If you have a lot of games, EMU's you could maybe stick them on the 350GB instead too.

MAJJ

Hi SouperComputer,

Thanks for the advice. Plans may be on hold for a bit, for the HD. Was likely to opt for Acronis as it has great reviews - will practice and refine my approach with it.

Cheers,
majj