Oh, F***. I just wrote a long detailed question and it went away.

I have to replace my hard drive, and I will use a WD SATA 640G drive, now formatted as Fat32. I have always thought NTFS is much better. I'm putting this on my HP a820n, Pentium 4, fast, no problem space or speed-wise. No room inside the box for a master/slave setup, though. No disk cage, just screw it onto the frame.

I plan to remove all of the extras I've installed on this machine, unplug printer, scanner, hubs, etc., go back to one monitor and remove the NVidia card for now, and then use the HP WinXP Home "rescue" disks I made when I first got the computer. This is to get the drivers and the usual useful programs and tons of crap they add in. I will then upgrade to XP Pro, uninstall crap, then add in my devices and drivers and software.

My query is this. Will XP Home recognize that it is writing to a brand new hard drive and ask me if I want to format the drive, giving me options, or will it simply write on the format that is there? If I go straight to XP Pro I won't get the HP protocols, drivers, and names that some of my software may require in order to be reinstalled on this machine. (Adobe in particular). Should I instead set up the new HD enclosure (I plan to put my existing internal drive into this for a backup) but use it to first format this larger HD? I'm not planning to partition it at this time, though I may. I used to keep all of my programs and data on a D: drive, even though it was still on the same physical disk, to protect it from some problems. I may do that again. Any thoughts? Data only on D, or Data and Programs?

I posted here because John mentioned some Seagate software that is used for formatting disks. I won't try to recreate my whole thing (I can't believe I didn't immediately check to see if this message "took" after I hit "submit message." I don't have Word up and running now, it is bare bones until the replacement).

I'll start this tomorrow, it will take too long and I'm tired. This is not the kind of thing to start when you're tired, it's too easy to make stupid mistakes when you are tired. :)

SRS