Installing New Hard Disk Drive

Couple different questions, I hope I can get some answers. :]

I took out my old hard drive from my old pc and installed it into my new pc. It seems to be partitioned with a recovery drive. I plan on backing up what I need and then just reformat the drives.
Questions:
1. Do I format both drives? The hard drive I just installed and the recovery that came along with it? I'm guessing yes, since the recovery drive was the backup for the drive I just installed, and it's no longer my primary drive.
2. How can I rename the drive letter, I'm sure it would be easy since I will be formatting it, and won't mess anything up as far as paths are concerned.
3. Should I partition part of the drive to be the recovery? The current recovery drive that came with the new drive I installed is only 6 gb; I'm sure it needs to be bigger for this pc. The recovery drive is just for reformatting the pc, and is just a backup? Can I make my own recovery drive, or is that only OEM related. If I can't, is there software that mimics a recovery drive and actually partitions, or do i have to use backup software like acronis, etc?
4. Also, if I wanted to dual boot, is it possible? Or would i have to clean install and set it up from the beginning? Can you dual boot with 1 OS on each drive or does both OS's have to be on the same drive?

Thanks in advance.

 

Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure if i format the new drive I installed, it will delete the Recovery drive since its only a partition of the main drive itself.


EDIT: Just reformatted and it didn't wipe out the recovery drive with 6gb of space...Should I reformat that? Then I will have a drive with 6 gb...=x

 

hello McGrady,

if i was you, i would delete both old partitions from your
new drive, next i would create one or few new partitions
according to your need ( one as the recovery partition,
second as the data one and/or the third as the second OS,
for example ) dunno how big is your drive

to do this i would recommend Paragon or Acronis bootable
disc. i would keep the image of my primary OS over there,
along with my data. you can keep everything together on one
big space or on few dedicated small partitions.

 

McGrady,

1. As you wish.

2. The drive letters can be easily changed using Windows's own Disk Management or a 3rd party partition software. You just can't change the current system or one with system files (e.g. pagefile) that the current OS is using. For the others, be careful when you change the drive letters, some program paths may become invalid, but normally you just have to worry about this if the program was installed with the current booted OS.

3. For recovery, I'd make DVDs instead of using a partition. If the HDD fails, you won't be able use that partition anyway.

4. Yes, it's possible, normally you don't need to reinstall the OSs, just edit the bootloader to point to the right disk/partition. For XP, just edit the boot.ini file. For Vista, EasyBCD is a good free tool to modify the bootloader.

5. When you do a regular format, it will only format the drive letter you specified, it doesn't format all the partitions on the drive at once.