Can I copy my operating system and all its tweaks to a replacment hard drive ?

Factual Questions
1

I am currently running windows xp pro on my primary drive, this hard drive has just the one partition c: size 40Gb

I have a second drive installed which is mostly data, documents and a few programs installed on this d:

Now I have just bought a new hard drive 80Gb to replace to current c:, I would like to avoid rebuilding everything on the new one. Can I firstly remove the second drive that is in at the minute-then stick in the new hard drive as a slave- copy all of c: to this new disk-take out the old c: and chane the new drive to primary ?

will this work? My guess is that it wouldn’t becuase nothing (I dont think) will have been written to the mbr on the new disk.

so my second idea is to install windows xp pro on the new drive using the installation cd then to copy everything and overwrite the newly installed stuff.

The reason I do not just want to rebuild everything from scratch is I have made little tweaks like changed dlls so I can have nice themes and also servicepack 2 and all my updates would need to be downloaded again.

Will any of these methods work ?
Any other advice ?
Thanks in advance

2

Yes, you can use a disk imaging program to back up the old hard drive, then restore the image to the new one; the MBR will be taken care of as part of the process, I think.

3

Norton’s Ghost Software will do it for you easily. I’ve used it in far too many cases to count. Great software.

It’s also VERY likely that the HD you bought also came with software to do just this for you as well. If it did not come with the software, I would check with the manufacturer’s website to see if software is available. It may not be as good as Ghost, but most drives I’ve purchased did have software available to do a copy to the new hardware.

4

Maxtor have a program called Maxblast which you are licensed to use if either of the drives is a Maxtor.