Hard Drives Baffle Me??!!!

[stinkeye]

Getting ready to build a new rig for a buddy of mine. One question about the hard drive though, I plan on doing a clean install of Win 98 on the new 40GB drive he bought. Upon doing clean install and initial boot, what is the best method of using the old drive. I know we could set it up as a slave to the new drive, but then we would have 2 windows directories. Wouldn't that cause confusion when installing new programs? Would the install programs attempt to put files in the wrong windows\system directory? Could i just change the name of the old windows directory to avoid these problems? Any help would be appreciated.

 

[lowtech1]

You could try imaging the old drive over to the new drive if you have the software (there are free/shareware such as Partition Manager that could do it).

Or, mount both new & old HDDs into a working machine and copy the old drive contents over to the new drive, then remount the new drive onto to the old puter.

 

[pocketdemon]

stinkeye:

If you want to use the second harddrive as a slave for the purposes for data storage and such, you can back up all important files that are on it and format it, which gives you a nice, clean drive to work with.

But if you don't want to format, and just want keep the old drive as-is then the answer to your question about programs installing to the wrong harddrive is this: Because your second drive will be slave to the 40G, once you actually get into Windows 98 (which is on the new drive), your old drive will be seen as just a secondary harddrive with a bunch of files. New programs will not try to install to the old drive, so that is something you don't have to worry about.

My advice would be to install Windows 98 on the new harddrive, hook up your old one as slave, transfer all important files from the old one to the new one, format the old one, use the old one for back up. But that's just me.