replacing main hard drive in WinXP computer

After reading the thread on WinXP activation I came up with a question that maybe I could get help with.

I loaded Windows XP on my wife's computer, running the upgrade from Win98SE. After getting that to run now I want to replace her main hard drive. I know with XP I can install the new drive and partition and format it directly through Windows XP, then I can copy the entire C: drive using Norton Ghost. At that point can I pull the old drive and have the new drive automatically work as C: or will it still want to be known as D: ?

It's probably better not to install it in XP first, because that's what assigns it the drive letter D: in the first place.

I like to connect only the new drive then use FDISK from a Win98/WinME boot disk to create a FAT32 partition. There is no need to format it since it only needs to be visible in DOS for Ghost. Then I connect the original drive and use a Ghost 2002 or Ghost 2003 floppy to copy the entire drives in DOS (those downloadable utilities from the major drive manufacturers work as well and are free). Yes, if the original is NTFS it will overwrite the FAT32 partition with a NTFS one. Disconnect the original then boot from the copy. Since it was never loaded as D: in XP, it will already be C:.

If you accidentally loaded Windows and mounted the new drive as D: (or it just failed to boot) then disconnect the original and follow the instructions in the other thread to reset the copy to C:.

It's too bad Raggie33 doesn't hang out around here anymore; he used to always answer these types of questions.