I have a primary Maxtor 40 GB HD and a secondary Maxtor 80 GB. I've had some funky things happen with the 80- sometimes my system "looses" it and I have to wipe it clean and start over- then it's fine for a while.

In preparation for upgrading from 98SE to XP I tried to copy the contents of my 40 drive onto the empty 80. I did it overnight using the Maxtor lifeline software and in the morning there was an error that there wasn't enough room on the 80 to take everything from the 40??? There are no partitions on the drive.

Any idea how that can be?

Without formatting and partitioning, the drive is viewed by the OS and the tansfer program as 0 bytes.

It copied over most of the folders and files- over 30GB worth, I coud see and access the data that had been copied over. The 40 GB drive has about 37 GB on it. The message said that the 80 had run out of disk space. (?)

OK...upgrading from 98 to XP...

I just typed up a nice long post then on re-read realized I had missed that one detail...GRRR...

Get Max Blast (http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/maxblast3.htm) and use that to partition and format the 80GB drive. You can do it one of two ways, one large partoition or two of them. Two would be my choice, one for OS, one for storage. Either way, set the 80GB drive up as Master on the IDE controller.

If you go with one partition, install XP on that partition FIRST, then transfer files you want to keep from the other drive after windows is up and running. You only need to transfer data files, (pictures, text files, spreadsheets etc) programs can't be copied, they need to be installed properly or they will not work.

If you use two partitions, you can transer data first, using DOS or third party software, but I would go ahead and install XP and use Windows Explorer to transfer files. Max Blast will want to transfer everything to the Primary partition and leave you with a bootable OS, you want to install XP on a clean partition, NOT on top of win98.

That said, I would install XP on the 40GB drive and use the entire 80GB drive for storage, maybe set up as two partitons, 40GB each. I normally go for a bit smaller partitions, I keep my 20GB primary on the win98 machine set up with four partitions, 5GB each, and a 30GB drive all one partition for storage. 3 years and I haven't gotten 1/4 of the 30GB drive filled yet, and it's mostly drivers and security software for working on computers. But I burn the drivers folder to CD soon as it gets to around 500-600MB, wipe it out and start over...