William,

This is a clear case of the blind leading the blind, so don't except my word as gospel - there are far more
knowledgeable people on this list than I. With that said...

Installing the new hard drive is the easy part. However, it seems to me that dual booting two Win9x versions,
even on separate drives, is inherently troublesome, even if it's possible. Personally, I would scrap the dual
booting idea, and try to tie up the loose ends with AOL first, then install the new drive, make it the master,
and install the new OS on it as the active partition. Then I would find a way to import my favorites, address
book, etc. from the old drive without trying to connect to the net through AOL at all. Otherwise you'll end up
with the same insidious AOL problems you set out to eliminate. Once you have moved what you want from the old
drive, you could format and partition it as you please, which will give you more storage space.

If you decide to go this route, you'll need instruction for installing a new drive. Although I recently
installed another hard drive in my (ironically, HP Pavilion 8860), I'm not good at remembering all the
details, but it really isn't hard to do. However, I think the explanation is best left to those who do this
often. hth

Al Thompson

----- Original Message -----
From: "William Closure" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, November 03, 2002 9:32 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Dual booting off two hard drives


> Al,
>
> Thanks for your response.  Looking back at this, I probably could (should)
> have been a little clearer on this.
>
> Yes, AOL is an ISP with built in browser.  Thanks to the people on PCSOFT, it
> has become abundantly clear to me that AOL has messed with my computer, and
> not for the better.  As my HP Pavilion 8380 running Windows 98 has become
> increasingly unstable, and I want to get rid of AOL, and start with a
> broadbrand connection, and I have a 2 year old, new in the box 40G Maxtor
> hard drive waiting to be installed, I thought I could kill a lot of birds
> with one stone.  Fact is, at least in the short run, I will have to have
> access AOL to close things out.  And, over time, I will still want to access
> it, because I have things tied to it, such as favorites, address book and
> downloads that are tied to proprietory AOL software.  (Anybody out there know
> how I can coax these out of AOL?)
>
> Anyway, it would seem to me that one way to solve this would be to install
> the new hard drive as the primary drive, load everything, including new ISP
> software unto that drive, and carry on.  The second drive could be accessed
> to pull files, but the operating system would remain on the new drive,
> unpolluted by all the AOL settings.  However, I am hoping that I can dual
> boot from the original hard drive so that I can still access AOL during this
> transition period.
>
> So, how do I do that?  Is there a beginners tutorial out there that can set
> me in the right direction?
>
> William Closure

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