On Monday 04 February 2002 01:21 am, you wrote:
> I purchased a new motherboard (Soyo P4S Dragon Ultra), new processor
> (P4/1.7) and new drive (WD 120GB) and, at the same time, bought an OEM copy
> of WinXP Pro.  I would like to start "fresh" with these by using them to
> replace the current mobo/processor & drive in a system I already have.
>
> However, I am in a quandry about how to accomplish this without at least
> booting to Win98SE, either the existing drive or a bootable Win98SE floppy.
>
> Could someone provide some guidance for me on how to accomplish this?
>
> I am also somewhat handicapped by the fact that the BIOS in my old
> motherboard (SuperMicrdo P6DBE rev1) &, I think, Win98SE, will not
> recognize the full 120GB of the new drive without using WD's disk
> mamagement software, which would prefer to avoid.
>
> Any suggestions?  A step by step would be really nice.
>
> - Paul
>
Paul:
I've done this a couple of times. The drill I've followed is to first install
the new motherboard and CPU. Then I install the new drive as the master, the
old one as slave and then I install the new OS from the CD. After the
system is up and running, the data on the old drive is still available. The
old drive can be removed later, or it can be reorganized to provide
additional storage (of course, with 120 gb, that is probably not an issue),
or used as a form of backup. The win98se installation can be blown away, of
course, as can any programs that are on the old drive.

There are two possible gotcha's. The first would be if the old drive used
some kind of overlay disk manager, the second would be if the you decide to
use a different filesystem format on the master drive than the one on the old
drive -- eg FAT32 vs FAT16. I'm not sure how you dance with either of those
bears.

An alternative would be to set up a dual boot system, keeping the old drive
for 98se and the new one for XP. This has been covered on these lists in the
past, and I'd suggest that you look through the archives. If you decide to go
that route, the one thing to remember is that the 98se system is set up for
your old motherboard and CPU, so the last thing that you will do before
shutting down the old system is to go into device manager and remove all of
the hardware that will be changed. Then, when you fire up the new system,
you'll have to reload all of the drivers. Frankly, I've had mixed success
with this -- sometimes it works quite well, other times it's taken a while to
get things back to where they were.

Good luck,
Carroll Grigsby

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