Hi

Current spec (sadly)
Athlon Xp2200, 512mb ram, KT4 ultra M/Board, 80GB HDD IDE,GeForce Ti4200 AGP8x, Windows XP Pro (FAT32), assorted software.............used mainly for internet access, digital imaging, assorted homework excel, Word and PDf files

Okay you can probably see the limitations of this spec computer but then it was built in 2002.

After being infected with several viruses (Thank you kids) which my installed software failed to deal with (Spybot 1.4 and AVG 7.5 free) I have decided to do a little unpgrading and reinstall windows XP.

I have installed a Seagate 320GB HDD SATA Raid as a slave which was preformatted as NTFS.........this is recongised on my system as an additonal drive............phew so far so good!!

The plan now is to reinstall XP on this drive, move across all my data, then reformat the old 80gb drive and use it purely as a back up drive.

First problem................how do I partiton the new drive, it shows as one huge drive...........is there a tool in XP??

Second problem..............what happens to files when you transfer them from FAT32 onto NTFS??

Third..........Can I go ahead and install XP on the new drive and partiton it at a later date??

I feel that I should know or at least understand some of these issues so any help greatly appreciated

My level of skill and knowledge ranks alongside "I know how to switch it on". On the plus side, I am quite good at following instructions (I have a girlfriend who administers daily lessons).

Cheers

Fent

During a Clean Install of XP you will have the option to partition. You will not be able to change this afterwards from within XP but you can use a partition tool such as GParted.

With a SATA drive you will need the motherboard SATA/RAID drivers on a floppy disk. At the very beginning of installing XP you will see a prompt to press F6 in order to install these drivers.

FAT32 should transfer to NTFS without a problem. NTFS reads FAT32 but not visa versa. Good page here: http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/ntfscvt.php

Programs will have to be reinstalled from the disks but of course you can transfer old data. Here is a good guide: http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/fast.php