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Two hard drives, booting from broken one

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  • 28-06-2011 12:04pm
    #1
    Newaglish
    Registered Users Posts: 2,734 ✭✭✭


    Hey folks,

    I have two internal hard-drives in my custom-build PC. One very old one (about 30GB, 10 years old) and one I bought last year (1TB). I had Windows XP set up on the old hard drive and all my programs & files stored on the newer one.

    This was probably to be expected, but the 10-year old hard drive died a couple of weeks ago and I'm trying to figure out how to set up my PC to boot from the newer hard drive and to just ignore the old one as it has no data on it I need to save. There's no OS installed on my new hard drive - is it just a case of buying a new copy of Windows 7 and installing it? Will this wipe all of my data? Also, I don't have an internal CD-ROM, it's an external USB DVD-ROM - can I reinstall Windows from this?


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    #2
    bonzodog2
    Registered Users Posts: 6,210 ✭✭✭bonzodog2


    Buy/obtain whatever OS you like, apart from Vista, install it.

    Some thoughts:
    Will your PC run Win7 performance-wise ?

    You say your programs are on the 1TB drive. You may have installed them to that drive, but many programs' installation procedure involves many registry entries, on the boot drive.

    You should be able to install from the USB DVDROM if the BIOS supports booting from it.

    Installing windows does not generally wipe a drive that has a working filesystem.


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    #3
    Newaglish
    Registered Users Posts: 2,734 ✭✭✭Newaglish


    Cheers for the reply - how can I check if the BIOS supports USB booting? I've checked in the BIOS and I can certainly select the USB DVD drive. Which I guess answers my question?

    Specs are reasonably good so I do think I can run Windows 7 no problem.


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