This may sound elementary for some of my fellow Pimps, but it's not so for me...

I've been running Win XP Home on ITR. The HDD was a single 120GB IDE, and it still has the WinXP Home OS installed, as well as all my documents, bookmarks, mp3 files, pictures, etc.

Been playing BF2 with Spike and the boys, hearing about Raptor this and Raptor that (Got RAPTOR???). I broke down and bought a 74GB. I decided to install the OS on the Raptor, logic being that to have a program/game on the Raptor, but using an ATA interface to access it would essentially negate the speed boost (if my logic here is flawed, it's too bad and too late). So I pulled the IDE drive completely out, hooked up the Raptor, popped in the SATA drivers floppy, and away I go.

Win XP Pro installed fine (and FAAAAAAAAAST!!! ), but now I want to recover all my pics and whatnot off the IDE drive. What I'm worried about is hooking up the IDE drive, and having IT try to boot from it's Win XP Home install when I power on the computer. The plan is to recover the files, save them to the Raptor temporarily, and then erase/reformat the IDE drive, then transfer all files back to it purely for storage purposes. Logic here being that the seek/access times would be about the same as if the IDE drive were the only one in the system (as opposed to the example above)

Any help and/or suggestions would be most appreciated...

Make sure the boot order in the bios is set to hit the Raptor first. You may also get a selection screen like the old NT boxes or a linux boot loader, in which case you just choose the XP pro. You can then copy all you like.

Either way. if it does boot from the SATA drive or the IDE drive. You can pull files or push files to wherever you want. I dont see why your worried about which OS it boots to, as long as you get your files off right?
Once your done, just format the 120gig.

mrcracker, the BIOS idea makes a lot of sense, thanks for that one...

zer0s, the reason I'm "worried" has to do with my inexperience with SATA drives (never had one before, but I think now I will try to use nothing but SATAs)... If the situation came up that necessitated me reformatting/reinstalling on the IDE, I know about the older way of doing it, with a Win98 floppy for FDISK and FORMAT C: /s... Install Win98, then upgrade to WinXP (that was the way I did it before I managed to get my hands on a FULL version of XP (Pro, what I'm running on the Raptor now)...

External USB Drive Kit. Set it up in one of those and drag and drop away.

I can't believe I didn't think of this before... I just set up a three computer network here in the "orifice", and two of them are right here with me, both sharing the same monitor... The A64 has the Raptor, and the P4 has a little 20GB IDE drive, just as aF@H machine... Maybe not just a F@H machine anymore...

I can install the HDD on the P4 and let it run, no need to worry there... I can keep all my files where they are, copy the ones I use the most over to the Raptor, and use the other comp for photo editing and whatnot...

If it tells me I have to re-activate b/c of the hardware "changes", that's too easy...

I want to thank everyone for their input and ideas... Rep to you for helping a n00b out...

Well, it seems you found a solution, but if you wanted to do it the original way, you just make sure you have the SATA/SCSI (most BIOSes have it marked that way) set as a boot device higher than the IDE.

I had a scary incident the other day with a Norton disk in the computer and giving it a reboot. I wasn't paying attention, and it booted up to my IDE drive (which still has my previous install as a backup). I didn't realize it at all, and so here I am with an installation from 5 months ago. I was freaked out, especially at the prospect of losing some of the stuff I had done in the last week and hadn't had the chance to backup.