xp onto new hard drive from recovery CD

[ericthebrave]

I want to reinstall windows, but am trying to do it on a new hard drive. (so i can keep my existing drive and retrieve stuff off it at a later date, + use this old installation for trying out new software. I'm ok about booting from different drives)

I only have a recovery CD that came with my computer. It starts to install on the new drive, but then i get an error saying it cant find some partition. (drive works ok as has been in my brothers computer as his operating system disk, and has been formatted since. Its a 230 Gig SATA drive).

Is the installation failing because i am trying to do it from a recovery CD?

EDIT- probabaly better if i post the exact error message!! But i'm at work at moment so will have to wait until i get home!

 

[Clive795]

I think you will find that the original hard drive has got a small ( on the machine I am currently using it is 7Gb on a 160 Gb hard drive) partition that contains the data needed by the recovery CD. This partition is often hidden from the user but you may see it in 'My computer'. If I double click mine it gives a warning telling me it is a recovery partition and that i shouldn't make any changes to it.
If you are able to copy the whole partition and put it on the new drive it may work but I have never tried it.

 

[ericthebrave]

well i managed to sort it out. For some reason the new disk had a small 200M partition on it (maybe it had been like this on my brothers PC). I deleted all the partitions then reformated as NFTS and it worked

Now i've just got the joys of reinstalling all my software and endless updates