Moving up to XP and new HD. Some questions.

I have to buy Adobe Audition v2.0, because they don’t make any versions that run under Win2K anymore. So I also have to install XP. I have a sealed copy of XP Pro here. I figured the best way to go about it is to get a new, large capacity hard drive and start fresh, saving the other drive with its Win2K and programs that work, etc. I may even leave my current drive as-is, including its online connections, and use the new drive and OS for audio only.

The drive I’m interested in is a Seagate 250 GB ATA drive. On the compusa page where it’s listed, under System Requirements, it says:

“48-bit addressing is required to exceed the 137GB capacity limitation imposed by 28-bit addressing.”

I don’t know what that means, really, nor how to make it happen. Is this a BIOS setting, or is it something else?

If I have an OS on each drive, will I be prompted each time I boot up to select which OS I want to load?

Will I be able to read from and write to the new drive while in Win2K on the old drive? I’m hoping it will just be assigned a new drive letter in My Computer.

When installing XP, does it come with the facility to create a partition that I can use strictly for the OS, or do I need partition-creation software?

How different is the XP experience going to be? Is there anything I need to look out for? Is there anything I can do without?

I realize that I’ll have to have an internet connection in XP to get the latest service pack and updates, and register the OS and Audition. But afterward, if I disable its connection to the router, will I still need to have AV software on the new drive? The router has a built-in firewall, I have Avast! on the old drive, and I never use IE for any reason, since the last time I opened it, I got a virus from which the OS has never fully recovered.

I’ll probably have a bunch more questions later, but these are the most pressing for now. I will appreciate any advice anyone has for me. Thanks.

48-bit addressing is OS, BIOS, and controller governed.

How old is the copy and how old is the computer?

Pre-service pack 1 copies of XP (all flavors) are not 48-bit hip, but a fancy maneuver with a service pack is all you need to bridge the OS gap… which leaves BIOS and controller concerns.

2002 is pretty much the coming-of-age of 48-bit addressing… provided you did not buy your computer from a hack shop or the back pages of Computer Shopper. At any rate, if you are of the cheapskate persuasion, you could buy a HD controller to “address” the problem if need be.

You are unlikely to encounter any problems. I have the same drive in one of my machines.
If you do (i.e. the full size of the drive isn’t seen) you can download a Windows ME boot disc, use Fdisk to partition it (I’d do this anyway) into at least two smaller partitions, install XP on the first partition and keep the other(s) for your data. If XP dies on you, you can then reinstall without having to worry about your files on the other partitions.

XP isn’t too fussy about which drive it lives on and should on installation recognise your Win2k and offer to dual-boot.

If it isn’t a copy of XP with SPII on the disc, as soon as it is installed, stick some decent AV and AntiSpyware on before going to Microsoft for the updates and service packs. I would recommend Spybot Search Destroy (Download.com) Lavasoft AdAware (Same) and Avast. You will need protection while downloading all the updates which can take quite a long time.

No, it is more advisable to not have a bunch of processes running with SP installs running, if s/he has a high speed connection we are talking about 20-30 minutes. The first two programs are not even active monitoring unless you pay for them. The risk of infection during this window is trivial to the point of irrelevant. Remember, the vast majority of infections are from things we download and install ourselves. Windows updates from MS site will be clean. I would be more worried about him picking up a bad freebie spyware app like spy sherrif than being infected at random.

Thanks for the responses. To answer the questions:

The sealed disc is XP Pro, Version 2002 with Service Pack 2.
The computer is custom built with an SIS MB, 2.4 GHz CPU, 512 MB DDRAM. It’s a little over two years old.

I thought of another good question. If I’m going to use Fdisk to partition, what’s a good sized partition for just the OS? I imagine it’d be good forever if I allotted it 10 gigs. Would that about cover it?

I’d give it a bit more leeway than that as some of your packages would probably prefer to ride along with the OS. If you give it 30-50G it still leaves you tons of space for the rest of your stuff.
If you cram it in to too small a partition it makes life very difficult for defrag to operate on it.

Despite the slight criticism above I still stick by the AV first approach. I have done it before and found a lot of crap snuck in while running the update process. The connections I was using were not lightning fast, it has to be said, 1GB max, so the download times were quite protracted, up to about 9 hours for the downloads with installation and reboot breaks extending it even further. This is from a non-SPII clean install so yours will be significantly quicker.

10G will work, if you are careful to avoid storing apps there. You will probably be happier with a 100G system partition and the rest for docs.

Once you have your apps in place, consider pulling the 15 day trial of acronis true image and making a CD/DVD backup of that partition. That way in the event of virus/major OS disaster you can reload the os/app partition without disrupting your docs.

You don’t need to use fdisk, the XP setup disks have a partitioning tool.

If you want to get really slick, make an extra 5G partition on your old drive and move your swap file to it, don’t put anything else there. This way windows swapfile operations and other windows related drive usage will be pulling from separate drives speeding things up a bit as well as eliminating the problem of swapfile fragmentation which windows defrag cannot fix.

Instructions http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307886

Boo! :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks. I wouldn’t trust Windows defrag as far as I could throw it, which is why I’ve used Diskeeper for the last five years.

I’ve been spending too much time reading D&D-based webcomics. I read the subject line, and thought the OP was talking about gaining eXperience Points and going up a Hit Die because of it. And I wondered what such a thread was doing in GQ.

Honestly you can probably get away with using 2k. XP and 2000 are bassicly the same so what works on one will almost always work on the other

I currently have a Win2K drive that has all of my programs on it, but I need XP to run the Audition recording software, hence the desire to get a new drive for it. If there wasn’t much else on the XP drive, Audition would be blazing fast, which is a bonus. I would still like to know if I can have two drives with a different OS on each, and choose which one to load on boot up, or whether the two OSes have to be on the same drive for that. If it’s possible to go with two, what do I need to know about how to set that up?

Wireless stuff is a PITA under 2k if he has or is planning to utilize wireless.

Yes you can have 2 drives, a master and slave. But i would try and install Audition on your 2k drive before you go out and buy a new one. Because it seems to be the only reason why you are getting a new one. 2k/XP are pretty much compatible as far as programs go. They are the same basic kernel except XP got a facelift

Let me see if I can say this a third time in another way. When you try to install Audition version 2.0 on Win2k, it says “Audition does not support this operating system.” The software documentation and the Adobe website clearly state that Audition will not run on any OS buit WinXP, SP2. That’s why I need to install XP.

Thanks for the advice. I was already aware that I would be unable to run programs from the old drive off the new OS. That’s why I said above that I’d like to use the new drive and OS mainly for recording, and I’ve asked numerous times whether I’ll be able to still use the drive with Win2K and all my other programs, but I don’t seem to be getting an answer to that one. Does anyone know?

I’ve seen a Windows boot up screen asking which OS you’d like to load. Do they have to be on the same drive, or will it recognize a fully operational OS on another drive and let you choose?

If you leave the original drive connected, XP will see the Win2k installation and ask if you want to dual-boot. If you disconnect the drive, XP won’t know it is there and therefore won’t ask if you want to dual boot.

If your new HD is recognised at its correct size when you install it, there is no requirement to use the ME boot disk or Fdisk. This was only a fallback option if the drive was mistaken for a smaller one.

I would install the new HD as secondary master. Most OS’s prefer a master drive to a slave but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a primary master.