Assist Me...

[Ulyshia]

I have a Micron Computer, Pent. III, with 64mb. Ram, running Win 98 SE. I have two internal hard drives. The primary has
only 2Gb. and the second has 13Gb. I want to know if I can transfer hard drives and make the larger one my primary drive
w/o going through a lot of trouble? How, if possible can this be done?

[PostCode]

It can be done rather easily. However, you will run into other problems if you do. The cluster size of the current installation of Windows is different than the cluster size that the other drive is. Programs like Disk Defragmenter and Scandisk cannot work if they were installed on a drive with one cluster size and transferred to another drive that has a different cluster size.

Hard disk size Cluster size
-------------------------------
512 MB to 8 GB 4 KB
8 GB to 16 GB 8 KB
16 GB to 32 GB 16 KB
32 GB and larger 32 KB

THe best way is to install Windows on the larger drive, then copy data you want onto the new drive. Programs that you use will have to be reinstalled though. They cannot be copied over and work correctly.


Hope this helps.

[Ulyshia]

What about the hardware and their drivers... will all of that have to be re- installed as well? I am getting tired of compressing my C Drive. And when I download files to my larger drive, they sometimes won't work.

[eagle]

Yes you will have to reinstall all of the drivers etc. By compressing you c drive you may be saving some memory space but when you open a file that has been compressed it takes memory to open that file and if you do not have the memory ,,,,this is what causes your files not to open. Just my opinon but I would recommend you installing a larger drive , replacing the 2 gb and adding more memory.

[Murf]

As Postcode indicated it can be done, there is software programs out there that can do it, but you have to buy most of them.

If you don't mind opening your case up and unhooking some cables you can do it this way:

If you want to keep everything in-tack on the 13GB drive then I would unhook the 2GB (gray data cable & power connector), jumper the 13GB as the master drive and hook it back up.

Boot up with the windows 98 bootdisk and say YES to cdrom support, the screen will tell you the drive letter it assigns to you.

Go there with windows cd in and type setup.

This will install Windows 98 on your 13GB drive. You will have to install drivers that windows cannot install during the installation of "98". It should find and install most if not all of them.

Any programs other then Windows 98 will have to be reinstalled (not all but most).

Once this is done, take the 2GB drive and jumper it as a SLAVE and put back in.

Reboot, it should find the 2GB drive also.

Now you can move files (not programs) to the 13GB drive.

Once that is done you will have to uncompress the drive before you wipe it clean.

There is a free program out there called RANISH (http://www.ranish.com/part/) that can repartition, expand etc your drives.

The problem is if your C: drive is compressed you will have to uncompress it first.

If this is all too complicated, post back and maybe we can come up with a simpler solution.

[Ulyshia]

Please post back with an alternative. THis seems a bit too complicated for me. Also, tell me what that repartition software is, and what it actually does. Thanks!

[Ulyshia]

Murf: (or other)
WHen you were trying to explain how to make the 13gb. my primary, you said something about jumpering. Can you explain to me what this means. I think I want to try this. Also, does the new drive have to have Win 98, I want to go down to Win 95 for my daughter. Or can my present Drive C be WIn 95? Also, will the old Drive C have to be reformatted? Or will Win 98 remain on it? Will all of the present software remain on it, or will it have to be removed?

[eagle]

Read this article , it will help you understand the jumpering part that murf was talking about. http://www17.tomshardware.com/howto/20020904/diy-10.html

[Ulyshia]

(In the event that I am successful with this, what happens to my original C Drive?
Also, iis it possible that I can run win 98
on one drive, and win 95 on the other?