Hard Drive formatting help

My 4 year old system died on me recently and I'm in the process of building a new one. I had 2 hard drives in the old system, one for storage, and the other had XP as an OS on it. Seeing as I have no working desktop (just a laptop) or anyone that actually has a desktop to turn to....what are my options for formatting my drives so I can put them in the new system. I'm just trying to avoid buying new HD's if at all possible. Can anyone lend any advice in this matter? It would be much appreciated. Thank you.

 

You don't need to format your drives, especially not the one with the data on it. If you've got your XP install CD, You can put your original boot drive in as the C:\ drive and boot from the XP CD. If there is nothing you need to save, formatting is an option during the setup process. Choose to delete an existing partition when you have the option and then create a new one, format NTFS and allow setup to finish loading. Once complete, you can change drive letters on the CD-ROM drive to E:\ (or any other letter) and add the second HDD. The reason for adding it later is so that you don't accidentally erase the wrong drive. Whatever data you had is still intact.

 

Alright that sounds like a good option. I better get looking for that xp cd then.

 

If you are online and can write a disk you can download a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD, This has disk and other tools that can Format and repair disks, it is a free download and is a handy tool to have. Cheaper than buying an XP disk, tho you will need an XP disk to reload your new machine.

 

Alright here's an update:

I put everything together with little to no problems. The HD did actually boot up just like it was before. The BIOS setup came up on screen for the new mobo and all components were recognized correctly (CPU speed, RAM, HD etc) The only problem is, after the winXP splash screen nothing happens and I have to remove and re-insert the mobo battery to get it to post again.