----------
Jeffrey Delzer wrote on Thursday, May 21, 1998 11:40 AM

Hello all,

A friend recently bought a new computer system and wants to transfer
about 2 Gigs of data files from her old system to the new one. The old
system runs the plain vanilla Win95, while the new system runs Win95b
(OSR2).

Hi Jeffrey,
Are you comfortable with open PC cases? Then the easy thing to do is
open the 95B computer and connect the longest IDE 40 pin ribbon cable
you have to the secondary channel.  This may mean disconnecting the
cdrom drive but don't worry about it for now.  Open the old computer and
disconnect the hard disk ribbon cable.  Reconnect the long 95B pc ribbon
cable to the old pc hard disk.  Insert a win95 boot diskette into the old PC
and turn it on.  There will be no Drive C: when it finishes booting, but the
drive itself will be spinning.  Now turn on the new 95B pc.  The old pc drive
will show up as the secondary channel master disk, Drive D: if there are no
other partitions in the new 95B pc besides C:.  Now simply copy files as needed
between drives C: and D: on the 95B pc.  2 gig will copy in a few minutes this
way, which more than makes up for the screwdriver time spent opening the cases.

One thing I usually find doing this, the 95B pc will uninstall the cdrom from
device manager since it is not connected.  When you reconnect the cdrom to
a ribbon cable and close the case, Win95 will detect new hardware when you next
power up and you will be back to normal.  Please do not try to disconnect or
reconnect the ribbon cables while the power is on to either PC.
That would be ill-advised.

This trick has saved me many times from removing a drive from one PC and
installing it as a slave in newer PC so that I could upgrade my desktop but keep
all my files.
Tom Turak
[log in to unmask]