Using two hard drives

You can place program files on two different drives but I would not recommend it.  But to answer your first question, NO, you are going to have to reinstall those programs in order to work with the new OS because the .dll files are associated with the old OS.

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@superdemon wrote:

I have XP. After adding a new hard drive and making it a copy of my old one and setting the new one as the master and the old one as the slave and booting to the new one, Does add/remove see the installed programs on both hard drives? Can add/remove delete programs from one drive and not the other? If so how do you choose between them? Can a folder be shared by two drives and if so how?

The drive you boot to (the new one) is where all your programs reside as far as XP is concerned.  As far as XP knows, there are no programs on the second drive.  After things seem ok on the primary drive, format the old one and use it for storage.

If you now install a program on the old drive, Windows will know it's there since you installed it after starting with the new drive.

Folders don't exist across multiple drives.

I believe that most "retail" boxed hard drives come with the software to copy the contents of one drive to the other.  If you bought an "OEM" drive it probably does not come with the copy software.  In this case you would have to use third party software such as Ghost by Symantec or Drive Image by PowerQuest.

Or you can usually download the appropriate software from the manufacturer's site if you've bought an OEM drive.

I bought the drive at a computer show ,bare.     I went to the Western Digital site and found 'Data Lifeguard Tools 11'.

this tool will create a backup of a boot drive

thanks for the other links.

Yep, It will.