On 8/31/98   John Rinehart wrote:
>
>My question has to do with moving everything over to the P90.
>I have a new Western Digital 3.2G that I don't want to go through
>the trouble of reinstalling everything.  Just did that a few months
>ago.  The Maxtor 340 I will use as a second HD and plan to install
>Linux on it.


John:

If you're game, you can clone the Maxtor drive to your
Western Digital 3.2G ( the "WDC") drive. You'll have to
remove everything from the WDC, so, first of all, you need
to find ALL the drivers SPECIFIC to the HARDWARE of your
Packard Bell P-90 (the "PB-90") and BACKUP those files.
Verify your 486 has LBA support to recognize the 3.2GB
WDC drive (if not, you'll have to change the procedure).

After backing up the PB-90 hardware files, zero out the WDC
with the WDC pseudo-low lever formatter (on the WDC website),
FDISK it with a Win95b startup disk, choose your FAT and
partition size(s), set the drive Active, exit and format it with the
system switch. Then LABEL the WDC something unique, like
"WDC 3GB".

Next, take the WDC drive out and slave it to your 486 Maxtor (set
the drive select jumpers to slave, i.e. pins #3-4 closed), boot up,
go into CMOS and set the WDC HDD parameters, re-boot and
bring up Win95.

Then open a DOS window (make sure it's a WINDOW, not a full
screen). Do a DIR on the WDC drive to verify the drive letter for
the WDC drive (an "Active" partition slave drive gets assigned the
next drive letter after the master's primary DOS partition, regardless
of any other logical drives on the master drive).

Use any of the disk drive cloning utilities (Ghost, Drive Copy, etc.),
to transfer the contents of the C: drive, or use XCOPY as follows:

    XCOPY C:\*.*  D:\   /r /i /c /h /k /e /y    ; where D: = the WDC

Take the WDC drive out and return it to the PB-90. Boot into DOS
mode. EDIT CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to fit your PB-90,
particularly the CD-ROM drive since you'll need your Win95 CD.

Reboot and let Win95 add, reconfigure, etc., etc. the PB-90. If
you're in the clear you can either (1) go into Device Manager,
remove everything specific to the 486 and reboot and go through
the detection process again; or (2) re-install Win95 on top of
everything.

This usually will work with minor problems you can clear up. If
it doesn't work, then re-zero out the drive again and install Win95
from scratch, as Bob Wright recommended.  HTH.

Regards,

John Chin

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