Migration to new system - how would you.....?

[GunnySpook]

I'm getting ready to move to a new Conroe system, probably at the end of September. I'll be combining two old existing systems. One system has a Maxtor 200 Gig Drive in it, and the other has two 200 Gig drives and it, a Hitachi and another Maxtor. All three drives are approximately 70% full right now.

My intent on the new Conroe system is to use the Hitachi as the primary OS drive and set up the remaining two Maxtors as raid zero. By the way the system will not be overclocked. All 3 drives are IDE, running on a Promise card and the MB will be an Intel Bad Axe.

How would you deal with migrating the data on these? I suspect that the Hitachi will need to be completely reformatted and the OS (Windows XP) reinstalled, and the two drives destined to be raid 0 will also in effect have to be cleared.

So how do I migrate all this data? How would you do it? I have dual DVD writers, but I don't relish creating and burning 150 DVD's just for migration purposes. Is there a backup program you would use? Ghost?

I appreciate any suggestions anybody has.

The Gunny

[perkam]

Delete from all drives what you don't need, including any games/programs that you can install again.

And start burning data that you can't install again, like music or videos etc.

Once you've done that for all drives, you should have left w/e you can't erase. See the drive with the least amount of important information, transfer it over to the others and use that empty drive as primary for conroe.

Technically, this can be done with backing up stuff in only two drives and transferring over the remaining stuff from one to the other.

Perkam

[Silver Bullet]

Find a friend with some extra HD space .. otherwise go with what Perkham said and start deleting stuff you don't need.

[nn_step]

Install the Drivers for your Promise card and just plug it into your new system. no need for reformatting

[GunnySpook]

Thanks, guys - looks like I'll be using the time until Sept. deleting stuff and burning DVDs! :)

The Gunny