Upgrading the Operating System On a Windows Machine, and My Thoughts on XP (circa January 2002)

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I've done a number of operating system upgrades over the years, the most recent of which was about a week ago (22 December 2001).  I started out in the old days following the recommended route, which almost never worked well, and over the years have developed an alternative way of upgrading that is far less painless and is always wildly successful.  It does take a bit more time, and is a bit more expensive than the standard route, but in my opinion is well worth the extra added expense.

My upgrade technique is fairly simple and straightforward; I buy a new hard drive, install it as drive C, slide the old drive C up to drive D (and any other drives up as well), and then install the new OS on a clean empty hard drive; a pristine install. When I do it this way, the old machine essentially becomes a new machine again, quite literally.

I do upgrades this way for three reasons; a) hard drives are cheap (and just getting cheaper by the minute), b) upgrading an operating system in place almost never works well, c) old operating systems get terribly cluttered over time with orphan DLLs and unused registry entries and they get bogged down and run slower - sometimes a lot slower, d) my data files from my old setup are online and available on drive D so they transfer effortlessly, and e) if something does go wrong (it almost never does) I can re-jumper the old drive to be the boot drive again and get my old system back in ten seconds. Hmmmm, that's five reasons, not three, isn't it?

There is a down-side to doing it this way, but even the down-side has an up-side.... you do have to reinstall all your old applications on the new operating system on the new hard drive (remember, this is quite literally a new machine again, just like when you first bought it), but its a good time to weed out all the apps you don't use any more, which saves even more on the clutter (see reason c) above).

When I bought my new computer back in late August, XP was not out yet but the hype had started, so for an additional $15 I bought an upgrade coupon for XP-Pro (my machine was bought with 2000-Pro). It took Gateway longer than expected to fulfill the coupons (I think I know why - it wasn't just XP, it was XP and two CDs of drivers for Gateway peripherals).

Knowing XP was due to arrive at some point, I prepared for it by buying a twin to the one hard drive that came in the new machine (I now have two Western Digital 7200 RPM 80GB hard drives in the machine).  I mounted the 2nd drive right below the 1st one in the chassis, and with the side panel off the case it was (and is) an easy thing to reach in with a needle-nose pliers and re-jumper the hard drives to be either Master-Slave or Slave-Master. So while I waited for XP to arrive I ran the machine with old drive as master (booting Win2000) and new drive as slave (empty disk).

How did I install the new hard drive, you ask?

Most modern Intel-based motherboards come with two IDE channels, a primary and a secondary. Your CD drive(s) are most likely on your secondary IDE channel, filling up one or two spaces available on that channel. Your hard drive is most likely on the primary IDE channel, set as the boot drive. There should be one more space on the primary IDE channel, leaving room for one more hard drive there.  If all your IDE channels are filled with devices, all is not lost, you just have to buy an additional item - a card-based IDE controller to give you a third IDE channel.  But the boot drive is found on the primary IDE channel on the motherboard, so you may have to change IDE connections.

Adding another hard drive is simple to do but a bit obscure the first time.  Hard drives have jumpers on them to tell the IDE channel how to talk to them. The options are

Different brands of hard drives have different ways to set these options, but they all have them one way or another. For the past 8 years or so, hard drive manufacturers have been printing the jumper configurations right on the hard drive label so you have that reference handy, but it means you have to see the top of the drive to read them, which may be difficult if the hard drive is mounted in a computer.

As a concrete example, my new computer came with one hard drive (jumpered CS) on the primary IDE channel, and my DVD drive as master and my CD-RW drive as slave on the secondary IDE channel. I mounted my new hard drive physically right above the old one in the chassis (there was room both above and below), changed the jumper on the OLD hard from CS to MASTER, and jumpered the new hard drive as SLAVE, and my machine booted just like before, except instead of drive C as my hard drive, drive D as my DVD, and drive E as my CD-RW, I now had drive C as my hard drive, drive D as my DVD, drive E as my CD-RW, and drive F as my new hard drive. I was expecting the new hard drive to appear as drive D and push my two CDs up on the letter chain, but that didn't happen, which pleases me. I'd rather have it this way.

Once I had my copy of XP in hand, I merely reached in with a needle nose pliers and switched the jumper settings on the two drives. I changed the old drive from MASTER to SLAVE and changed the new drive from SLAVE to MASTER.

My XP upgrade finally arrived the Friday before Christmas. I installed it Saturday.  I re-jumpered so that the new - empty - hard drive was master, opened up the BIOS SETUP menu offered at initial boot (quick little message that appears during cold boot - "Press F1 now to enter SETUP") and set the boot sequence to include the CD-ROM, put the XP CD-ROM in the drive and booted off that to install. Zip Zap Zoop.

All my old data is now on drive F and I'm moving stuff over to the C drive as I need it. Some (but not many) of my apps (mostly the little ones that I use as utilities like unit conversions or genealogy tools) can be directly copied from F over to C and they still work.  The easiest way to test an app to see if it can be copied successfully is to run it off drive F first to see if it works - if it does, then it'll probably work when copied to C. The rest of them I re-install as I need them, which auto-filters out the unused apps (see reason c) above, again).

Because of the position of the drives and the accessibility of the jumpers in this particular chassis, I can re-jumper at any time and return to the old configuration in the time it takes to shut down, move two jumpers, and reboot. I haven't needed to do that, though.

XP has some awesomely neat features that are very subtle and I have fallen in love with, but (strangely enough) are not touted in the ads. It also *LOOKS* very different, but under the window-dressing (pun intended) its very VERY much like Win2000.  The more I dig into it, the more I find Windows2000 lurking under the surface with a prettier, more colorful face on it. My only problem so far, which got resolved, was that my ability to print to my networked printer (the SMC router has a print port) was degraded (prints weren't finishing and the paper was staying in the print channel of the printer) until I thought about it a bit and figured out what was wrong.

The real challenge will be for folks who have never encountered NT or 2000, and are transitioning from Win95/98/ME to XP. Someone who is used to Win95/98/ME may have a hard time adjusting because all they've ever known is the sloppy no-security world of consumer-grade Windows, and every low-level concept presented in XP is a potentially new idea..... ("Why do I need administrator privilege just to install software??").  XP (and NT and Windows 2000 before it) is a *real* operating system, with symmetrical multi-tasking and multiple user accounts and security and process threads and system services.... etc. etc. etc.