My sister has two computers. One is a compact type with Windows XP Pro installed. The problem is that this computers hard drive is only 20 GB. The second computer is a Compaq with an 80 GB hard drive and Windows XP installed. She would like to have the XP Pro on the larger hard drive, but the XP Pro was preinstalled on the smaller drive and of course there are no install cds. Can we move the smaller slim drive into the regular case so that she would have more hard drive space to work with? I have experience adding optical drives, RAM, and USB ports but not with hard drives. I would appreciate any help. Thank you.
your best bet is to use a free program like "macrium reflect" to make an image backup of your small hard drive windows xp, then restore that image backup onto the larger hard drive. The image backup will be bootable when restored on a larger hard drive. But if you want to move windows xp from one computer to another that will probably not work because of the different hardware. But at least you should make an image backup of both hard drives windows xp, that way you have a saved backup that you can restore in case you run into problems. http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp
Thank you for the reply. I'm sorry, but I got some of the info backwards. Communicating long distance with my sister. XP home edition is in the smaller slim drive, and she has a cd for it. The XP pro version is in the bigger drive on another computer. She was hoping we could just uninstall XP Pro from the computer with the larger drive and install the home edition. The computer with XP Pro was purchased used and she found out when she tried to update it that it was not "legal". She got it because of the larger drive, and the room to add another optical drive. Am I right to assume that because she has the cd we could do this without any problems? Thank you.
