Reinstalling Windows XP on replacement hard disk

Question

My existing 200 Gb hard disk (running Windows XP home edition SP2) is old, running slowly and will not de-fragment so I have installed a second, 320GB hard disk alongside it on a Dell Dimension 4600. I have partitioned the new disk (30 GB - and 290 GB), given it the drive letter 'F' and made it the Primary Master (the old disk is the Primary Slave). Now I wish to install Windows XP home on the new disk and cannot find a way of doing this. Can anyone advise me please? This is what I have done

1) Tried to boot using the Dell Operating System disk (Windows XP home with SP1) supplied with the desktop - but it wont load. The CD light indicates information is being read from the disk for a short while - then nothing happens

2) Disconnected the old 200 GB disk and tried again with the operating system disk - same problem

3) Tried to boot off the A drive using a set of floppy disks created from the Windows XP home edition SP1 boot disk creator (dowloaded from Miscrosoft's website). Disks 1 and 2 load - then the process sticks during disk 3 - giving me this error message: Could not load setupreg.hiv - error 4099

4) Tried disconnecting the old hard disk and booting of the floppy disk set as desribed in 3 above. Same problem - only the error message on disk 3 reads like this: could not load halaacp1.dll - error 7.

Now I've run out of ideas. Can anyone help? Thanks!

mombodog · Answer

1. Leave old drive disconnected 2. Enter the bios and set the cdrom as first boot device 3. Put the XP cd in the drive and restart the system, hopefully it will boot from the cdrom now.

jmwills · Answer

Try Diskeeper to defrag that drive and I would image the old drive to the new.

moonstonefilms · Answer

But my original disk is badly fragmented. I have tried defragging it using the windows disk defragmenter - but it wont improve the drive beyond 25% defragmented. So I assume if I do this I will be copying the file fragments to the new drive. What I really want to do is reinstall XP...surely it can't be this difficult to do!?

moonstonefilms · Answer

I've done this - see points 1 and 2 in my original note. No joy I'm afraid! The installation CD whirrs, the light comes one for a while - then nothing.

jmwills · Answer

Once again, try Diskeeper to do what the Windows utility will not do.  If you have a new drive, copy the data over to the new drive then wipe the old one and reinstall XP.  No floppies are needed.

mombodog · Answer

'copying the file fragments to the new drive'   This will not happen.

Windows General

Reinstalling Windows XP on replacement hard disk

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