HDD Exchange

I just recently copied my old C Drive to a new F Drive using DrvCloner. Things appeared to go great, but I have two things I need help on at this time:

First, I now want to switch the drives and use my newly created slave drive as the bootable master. Would I do this simply by changing the jumpers and ribbon connectors and just reboot and keep my fingers crossed? What do I do about drive letter assignment? Will Windows XP take care of this when the new set-up is found?

Second, I had a partition called HP Recovery. It would be used if I ever needed to totally restore my hdd. DrvCloner didn't copy this file because it is a FAT32 file system partition. The only thing that copied was my NTFS file system partition. This FAT32 file is HP's solution to eliminating giving you CD's. I can get the CD's from HP for $10. Ain't that nice of them. They waste 5GB's of hdd space and charge the customer for the CD's. Any suggestions on how I can move this FAT32 to my new drive? I know why it is a separate partition, but I'm not sure why it is a FAT32 file.

You Guys are very helpful. Thanks

 

Do you know if that HP partition is required like they are on Compaqs? Or is it just a place for HP to store stuff? If it's just drivers for all your hardware, then I recommend that you buy the $10 CD or just download all the drivers for all your hardware (assuming that that's all that partition holds). I've never heard of an HP having that nasty little proprietary partition like Compaq's do.

BTW, if it is just drivers on that partition, that you don't want to keep your only copy of them on a hard drive as a hard drive could die at any moment - you definitely want a master copy on CD.

I'd just splurge for the $10 and get rid of the "special" partition. I keep all drivers including a copy of my Win98SE CD on my hard drive but it's just there for convenience - it's not my "master" copy.