I got a Seagate 400gb hard drive today. I am using it as a secondary drive to store all my media files on. Once I finish getting all my files from my C drive, which is pata, on to the new sata drive, I want to reinstall XP on C cause it's been a while, and it needs it. My question is this:

when i first installed the new sata drive i had to run the utilities disc to get windows to recognize it. had to tell it to set up a new drive. if i reinstall windows on C does this mean I'll need to run the utilities disc again to get windows to recognize it? If so, does this mean I'll lose all my files I've copied over there?

Thanks for any help anyone can give.

You shouldn't, nor should you have needed to use the utilities disc to do so.

If you right click on My Computer and hit Manage, you'll open up a computer management screen. Under Storage, there should be an icon labeled Disk Management. All disks show up in here, even if they're not properly formatted or partitioned.

The only reason you'd need another disc is if for some reason your version of windows didn't come with SATA drivers (which should be a rarer problem these days). Even if this was the case, installing new drivers shouldn't overwrite any data on your SATA drive

You wouldnt need utilities but I remember my old motherboard, everytime I needed to install windows xp I needed to press F6 and put a floppy disk in that had the drivers on it. Your experience may vary.