John,

Here's what you need to do for a successful transfer of ALL files to your
new drive:

This is tricky. Follow the instructions carefully!

Prerequisites: A Windows9x startup disk
BIOS: Set to AUTO detect

1) Install your new, blank hard drive as a slave to drive C:.
2) Boot with the startup disk
3) Run FDISK and setup the max primary partition for FAT16 - approx.. 2.1G.
FDISK will show the max size allowed (if you have Win95b/98 and want FAT32
enabled you can set it up with only one partition).
3a) Setup a 2nd and 3rd extended partition, as required, if using FAT16.
This will use the whole drive  and  will result in Drive letters D; E; and F
for the new drive.  Exit FDISK.
2) Format the new hard drive using FORMAT on ALL partitions (drives D:, E:,
F:).
3) Reboot into Windows9x.
4) The following will copy the contents of your old drive to the new drive:

  From a DOS WINDOW INSIDE WINDOWS9x (THIS IS IMPORTANT!),
  type the following command:

        XCOPY C:\*.* D:\*.* r/i/c/h/k/e/y

Notes: If you get a "switch not recognized" error, you're doing it wrong. To
find out what these switches do, type xcopy /? from a DOS WINDOW INSIDE
WINDOWS9x.
This command assumes that your new hard drive was assigned the letter D:\.
Choose "yes" if asked to overwrite any files.

5) When copying is finished, turn off the computer, open it up, and
reconfigure so that the new hard drive is the Primary Master drive and the
old drive as slave.

6) Boot to the Win9x startup disk. Using FDISK set the Primary Partition on
the new C: drive as Active.

7) Eject the Startup disk and reboot. If Windows9x does not boot from the
hard drive, put the startup disk back in and boot to it. At the A:\ prompt,
type:

SYS C:

This will recopy the system files to the new hard drive.

8) Reboot to the hard drive. It should boot to Windows9x - recreating the
SWAP file.
    Within Explorer you will now have your new drive as C: E: F: if
using FAT16 while the old drive is now the D: drive.

9) If everything is OK at this point, either keep the NEW drive as C: or
swap the D:drive (OLD) back to the MASTER and remove the NEW BACKUP hard
drive.

If removing the NEW drive to keep as your backup, then do the following:

10) Reboot using the original drive.  It should boot into Win9x.   Repeat
steps 6-7 if necessary (should not be!) if it did not boot into Win9x.

There are lots of reasons why the above procedure might not work on a
particular system. You'll be doing a lot of plugging and unplugging of IDE
and power cables, moving jumpers around, so it's easy to get one of these
things wrong, i.e., incorrectly jumpered drives, cables that aren't
correctly seated on the pins, incorrect HD parameters in CMOS, etc.
Also, the instructions above are a bit tricky to follow, and unless you are
very careful, something might go wrong the first time you try it.

Hope this helps!

Tim Klymkow

----- Original Message -----
From: johnfarrow <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, November 20, 1998 3:25 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Spare Hard Drive


>Hello,
>
>    Suppose you have one hard drive (IDE) and you buy another as a
>backup.
>You want to copy everything from the current operating drive to the new
>drive so that in case of a failure of the current one, you can simply
>have the backup take over.
>
>Question #1
>
>   How can you format/fdisk the new drive so that it has an active
>partion and be ready to boot incase of failure of the current drive.  I
>have heard that you can only have one active partion in the system, so
>how do you get around this?
>
>Question #2
>
>   Do you format the new drive from windows 95 or from DOS?
>
>Question #3
>
>   What is the best way to copy everthing from the current drive to the
>backup drive?

>John Farrow

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