Hey so i have a 250Gb hard drive that crashed on my and is in the shop (6 Weeks so far) and i aslo have this 40Gb hard drive with 3Gbs left on it and i was wondering if there was any way of installing a copy of Win Xp on that without loosing any thing??? rite now the only way i can get online is threw Ubuntu like cd so yah just thot u mite want to now that. sooo ummm yah any way to install xp on my 40gb without loosing any thing????

thanks
matt_s

If the 40GB is a single partition then no. You would need to install XP onto at least one full partition.

You could use a partitioning tool first to partition the drive and create a new partition to put XP on.

This partition should be at least 10GB to run XP.

Then the data on the 40GB would be retained but all programs would have to be reinstalled.

Another option is just to copy off the data on the 40GB to CD's or DVD's then go ahead and format the whole drive with XP.

i have no way of buring the data onto dvds b/c the only comp i have is the one i cant use so that aslo leves out partitoning it so there is no other way then is there???

thanks
matt_s

No. XP would format the drive prior to installing itself.

If there was a previous Operating System on that other drive you might get away with an Upgrade Install.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;Q315341