I have here a new 320gb HD and a full retail version of Vista Home Premium. Could I just put in the blank hard drive as master, install vista to it, leaving my current XP one (as slave) intact? And if I could would I be able to access the files on the XP one? I ask because I don't want to format my hard drive and then have compatability issues and not be able to use Vista properly.
OK thanks So I'd still be able to read/write from it if I boot into Vista? Does vista use the NTFS filesystem? Sorry I'm kind of new for this, never built a PC from scratch, only upgraded components and stuff
Yep, Vista uses NTFS, actually, I think it's a slightly newer version of NTFS but Vista can read the XP partition and XP and read the Vista partition. The only trouble you might have is if you try and access a restricted area (like user passworded files), which is normal on any version of windows reading from another.
