At 04:18 PM 3/4/1998 Dave Littlehale  wrote:
> . . .
>I have the plain vanilla win 95 4.00.950, 32 MB Ram, a BIOS that is over
>2 yrs old, and a Western Digital 1 GB HD with 24MB of free space.  I
>have purchased a 6.4 GB Western Digital HD.
>
>I have read through the manual and reading previous posts about related
>topics I know I have to make some changes to accommodate the new HD.
>I'm pretty sure I should install the B version of Win 95, but is there
>another way to do this?  The HD came with EZ Drive; should I use that or
>some other partition software?  Does anyone have any experience with the
>EZ Drive software?  It sounds too good to be true.
>
>Should I make the new HD the master or slave?  How should I partition
>the new HD?  What should I do about the BIOS problem?
>
>It sounds like the EZ drive software can handle most of the software
>problems.  I feel like this would just be putting a band aid on the
>matter.  But, I haven't had too many problems with Win95 and any that
>I've had probably have been due to my own stupidity.  I am very
>reluctant to upgrade to the unknown potential of Win95B.  I read about
>all the problems people have had.


Dave:

To answer your inquiry, issue by issue:

1.  Drive configuration (BIOS)

Do not use EZ drive if your BIOS supports LBA. The BIOS solution is
better than the overlay and hidden partition tables that EZ drive installs.
A two-year-old BIOS (1996) should have LBA. If not, what motherboard
do you have?

You have to create special boot floppy disks to recognize and use
and EZ hard drive and you need the EZ drive program to remove
the software from your drive if later you wish to do so. Windows
and certain drive utilities will choke on EZ drive and may trash your
data.

If you don't have BIOS support, go on-line to see if your motherboard
maker has a flash BIOS upgrade for your board. If you cannot, I would
recommend you upgrade the motherboard to get a newer BIOS
(and better all around chip set support). You can get a decent
motherboard for $20 more than a BIOS chip replacement.

2.  Drive positioning and Jumper Settings (MASTER-MASTER)

I would put my two hard drives on separate IDE channels and
make the IDE CD-ROM the slave on the secondary channel.
Put your new, bigger and faster hard drive as the Primary master.
The rationale is that an IDE device on one channel cannot be
accessed if its partner is in use. Not such a big deal but if you
are seeking to optimize.....

If you have 4 IDE devices, partner the new hard drive with the fastest
other IDE device (likely, your old hard drive). Jumper them Master/Slave.

Your Western Digitals have 3 jumper settings to select their drive
settings: SOLO and, in dual drive situations: MASTER and SLAVE.
Take care. Don't bend any pins. Pin #1 (usually towards the power
socket) goes to the side of the ribbon cable with the stripe.

3.  Partitioning (FDISK)

First of all, partition your new drive in the computer BY ITSELF, alone,
solo, with a WIN95b (SR2) Startup Disk. It's SAFER, and lets you set
the Primary Partition active. When you go into FDISK, you get a
menu that enables or disables LARGE drive (i.e. FAT32) partitions.

If you stick with FAT16 (I would if retaining the original drive, assuming
that, too, is a FAT16-er), you need to partition your 6.4 GB drive into
a Primary DOS Partition of less than 2GB and an Extended Partition with
logical drives also less than 2GB. Partition sizes from 1GB to <2GB will
have 32-KB clusters. The smaller the drive, the smaller the cluster.
FAT16 has a 2GB drive size limit.

Many users keep their largest FAT16 partitions just under 1GB to
limit cluster size to 16,384 bytes. That's half the size needed by
larger partitions but still a bit much for all those tiny data files.

FAT32 has a more robust basic file structure than FAT16, reduced
cluster size and no disk size limitations. Cluster size remains
4,096 bytes for partitions up to 8GB. That cuts wasted space
considerably. However, compared to a 32KB cluster system,
a 32KB or greater file requires eight times as many cluster reads
(or writes) if it resides on a FAT32 system with 4KB clusters. Also,
some applications may run slower on a FAT32 system, particularly
defrag software. Keeping track of all the additional small clusters of
FAT32 files makes for system overhead, not good on a Pentium 100
PC.

FAT32 is in the SR2 or newer versions of Windows 95. FAT32 differs
from the traditional boot record/file allocation structure, so all those
pre-SR2 OSs can't cope with it. Make sure all your utility software are
FAT32 compliant.

If you want FAT32 and want to use your old drive, convert your old
drive to FAT32.  Win98 Beta has a FAT16-32 converter or you can use
the current Partition Magic to convert your other drive.

4.  FORMAT

Format the drive with Win95b (SR2) disk using the "/s"  ("system" switch):

        FORMAT C: /s

then, format the rest of the logical drives on the new disk.

5.  CLONE the system

If you like your existing Win95a installation clone the drive; if not, you're
better off installing Win95b and all software from scratch.

To clone the Win95a drive: Turn off the PC, reinstall the OLD drive as the
BOOT disk. Keep track of your drive letter assignments. DOS assigns the
drives: C: >>> Boot disk primary partition D: >>> secondary disk primary
partition, then the Boot disk logical drives, then the secondary disk logical
drives. . .

Boot into your existing Win95a drive with the normal desktop. Open a DOS
WINDOW (no, NOT full screen DOS!) and enter the command:

        xcopy  c:\*.*   d:\   /r /i /c /h /k /e /y

You can always use software like DRIVE COPY or GHOST instead.

Then turn off the PC and make the new drive the Boot drive; leave the old
drive off for a while. Reboot and confirm the new drive runs Win95a okay.
From your CD-ROM drive, you should copy all the files in the Win95 directory
of the Win95B CD-ROM to one of the empty logical drives, in a directory
also called Win95, say d:\Win95.

Next, reboot with your Win95b Startup Disk and at the DOS prompt, go into
the C:\WINDOWS directory and rename WIN.COM something like WINN.COM.
Then go to your new D:\WIN95 directory and run: SETUP.

This should install Win95b over the existing Win95a installation, preserving
your installed programs and groups.

OR, INSTEAD, install Windows 98 beta 3 over the existing Win95a installation.
Win98 Beta will upgrade over any Windows or onto a clean disk.

Good Luck,

John Chin


P.S.  All you great PC technicians, please review this post and submit
your comments, corrections and additions (and CC: me). We ought
to fine-tune these instructions and POST them on the FAQ page
of Bob Wright's Website so we don't have to keep answering these
same hard drive installation issues, ad infinitum (ad nauseam).

Thanks.  jc.