UBER 1337 Poster Rep: 5  Joined: 26 Oct 2006 Posts: 1,037 OFFLINE | *Ouch Ouch Ouch*
**WARNING - DANGER WILL ROBINSON**
I agree that you 'should' wait until your step-Grandfather has a look, but just so you know for the future . . . .
First thing, (and this is important) . . . your present operating system is based on its 'own' installation settings, software, drivers and all sorts of other stuff . . . .
While it 'is' very very easy to swap your drive from one PC to another, (i assume your PC is infested with a Windows-based abomination?  ) there is a 50% chance XP will boot up, see things have changed and rearange itself to deal with the new mainboard, drives, grafix card, chipset, sound card, internet etc. . . and after that, a quick restart will finalise the new setup .. .
But - Windows is totaly crap at migration like that, and 50% of the migrations do not work, and you risk having Windows not boot up (seriously, if you do it as often as i have to, you’d see its very risky without a reinstallation of the O.S.)
For me, that’s not even a 10 minute problem, but to others, they can lose all family fotos, documents, all files, all gone  and not know how to get their precious data back, without asking a data recovery company to help (or wait for a friend to do it).
So, that explains why its not recommended unless your familiar with the stuff. But as Firewolf ( Helloooo ) says, watch how it’s done, take notice, ask questions if it’s OK to, and you’ll soon pick it up
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*quick recomenadations for a system setup*
If your gonna have data you *dont* wanna lose, i recommend either - - - -
(1) partitioning your main hard drive into 2, and keeping things you dont wanna lose on the 2nd partition, or
(2) as you were thinking earlier, have an actual 2nd hard drive fitted (which is simpler to sort out).
Don’t use NTFS cos it doesnt help, and can make repairs more awkward later. . .
Once you have a good working setup, i recommend making a system 'snapshot' of everything (on DRIVE C: only). I use Drive Image 2002 (v6) for that (version 7 is out now too but i prefer v6). It’s DOS based, and totaly bypasses all the Windows potential problems. (plus it handles all OS and file types too, not just Windows)
If my OS falls over, it takes me 1 minute 45 seconds to reinstall the snapshot files and it’s up and running again.
(there’s plenty of other utilities that will do the same job out there, even some 'free' ones
Hope it’s all sorted out soon for you
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