New hardware, windows cleanup

[Million]

Hi all,
I need some advice please. I recently acquired a new C2D base unit - CPU, mobo, RAM. I currently have XP running on a single core system. I will be taking the 2 HDDs from the single core system and adding them to the C2D build, along with the graphics card.
My current XP install is getting shirty with me as there isn't enough space on the windows partition anymore. There's a 160GB HDD, with 10gig for windows, 40 for program files, and the remainder for documents and storage. There's also a 250gigger with films and TV and nonsense on, but no important installed programs, just games which I don't care about re-installing.
As far as i'm aware, when I plug in the original HDDs, I will need a fresh start on XP so it deals with the new hardware. I also want to change the partition sizes on the 160gig disk. First question, what software do I need to format this HDD before the fresh windows and hardware install? Are the utilities I need all on the XP installation disk or do I need partition magic or something? Secondly, should the 250gig HDD work fine when added? Thirdly, what order would you do it all in?

Thanks in advance,
Million

[Lucio]

This should be fairly straight forward, connect up just the 160gb drive and pop in your Windows disc and boot up the system. You should get the Windows install screen, which after searching for exsisting copies of Windows will give you the ability to do a Clean Install. From this screen there's the ability to delete exsisting partitions. As long as you don't delete the one with the documents on, you should be able to turn the remaining space into whatever size parition you want (I'd recomend simply having 1 for Windows & Programs and leaving the other for documents). One thing you won't be able to do with the Windows disc is recombine the space back into one parition without loosing everything.


Once you've got Windows installed and working you can simply plug the 250gb disc back in. The process *may* go wrong because you're switching processor types and XP sometimes complains about this and crashes during the "finding exsisting Windows versions" stage. In this case, you'd need some way to wiping the Windows partition out, personally I'd use something like Partition Magic to do the job.