Moving Windows from 1 drive to another
 

I've got 2 hard drives. "C:" has Windows XP, "D:" is for storage. I want to change them around so Windows is on the "D:". Can I just simply copy and paste the contents of "C:" onto "D:" and vice versa, or am I oversimplifying this in some way?

I don't think it would work if you just put both drives in a 2nd computer and copied it straight. It might, but I doubt it. You most likely need something like Norton Ghost to do it. But I've never tried it before. Good question.

Yes, it can be done, but it's a bit painful. There are numerous ways to make mistakes and burn a day recovering. I've never written it up so I'm hesitant to send you into a culdesac.

Is one drive all C and the other all D?

The easiest way would be like Redjake said. If you have a third drive. Even if temporarily. Clone C to X, D to C, and X to D. Exchange C and D drives (cable & master/slave positions) as needed. Done.

If you want to get sick and there's free space on one drive for the contents of the other, you could say save D to an image file on C, clone C to D, exchange hardware positions, then restore the image of D.

Clone utils can be expensive or free, though the free ones usually require a bit more care. Free ones don't generally handle image files gracefully.

This kind of thing isn't needed much anymore with the price of drives.

Not only would you have to take an image of your current Windows install, you would have to change the destination drive to be your new C: drive. Otherwise a great deal of your registry entries would be invalid.

If you don't want to bother with the image it's probably easiest to just re-install Windows on your D: drive and copy your settings from your C:\Windows installation.

Using norton ghost and imaging is the way to go, period.

I'm pretty sure you can also use partitionmagic, but Ghost is the simplest way.