Okay, this is probably here on the forum somewhere but I am not finding it. So, please indulge and correct my ignorance on this issue. Here is the situation...

I am swapping over to SATA drives and also bumping up to XP from W2K. Since it is a 3 day weekend for me I dove in with what I had (XP OS and my 250gb storage drive). I have an 80gb drive on order. I want to setup the system with the 80gb drive as the boot drive and double up the 250gb drive in a RAID1 for my photos and media files. The only hitch is that the 250gb has XP installed on it currently.

I think that I can use the backup/restore function to move the OS from the 250gb to the 80gb without too much pain. Am I missing something? Will that do the trick?

Norton Ghost, Paragon Drive Copy, I personally use Acronis Drive Image. Any of these types of programs will work.

I thought imaging software would only help if going to an equal or larger drive.

I know that Acronis creates an image based on used space. So as long as the used space is less than 80GB it will fit.

Be warned though, that an 80GB image is gonna take a LONG time to do.

You are better off installing XP on your new 80GB drive, then plug in the old 250GB drive and transfer required files (ie: My documents)

By the way, when you mentioned that you were going from W2K to XP, and mentioned an 80GB drive, I had to double check the date because I figured it must have been a really old post that was bumped up.

Btw, I have two NEW Western Digital 80GB drives at my desk right now. The date of manufacture is listed as November 18th 2007 so I'm pretty sure they still make 'em like that. Perfect drive (i.e. CHEAP) for replacing a failed drive on an old computer... and my employer still has some Windows 2000 workstations in use. Ugh... don't remind me.

I downloaded acronis trial. I will give it a shot.

Yes, 80gb is small by today's standard. However my goal is to keep most everything off the boot disc. All photos and media will be on the raid 1 2x250gb drives. The boot drive should never see more than 10-15gb of data at any time. On W2K in the past I have usually used a 9-18gb boot drive and 40-250gb drives for storage. I have just never felt too secure with this setup. I think going forward a raid 1 and doing an online service like mozy will be the best bet for data security.

Acronis was able to do the downscale, but the drive was not bootable once the original disc was taken off line. So I am out a couple of hours of farting around, formatting, rebooting, and cable swapping. No big deal. Any ideas why the acronis image wouldn't boot?