At 12:44 PM 6/29/2002, you wrote:
>I had to ship my 850MHz AMD Athlon to vendor for warranty repairs and pulled my 40gb HD
>(to protect valuable and confidential business data) and not relevant to the repairs,
>before sending. I also have an old 100MHz Pentium with WIN95 OS, which I maintain for
>old files storage and for the grand kids to play small games on. Since I need to
>maintain processing business information on a current basis while awating return of my
>repaired machine, I need to know, before doing so, if I can temporarily replace my old
>small hard drive with the HD from my AMD (a WIN98 OS) without any kind of negative
>consequences. I am a little concerned, especially with the marked difference in BIOS.
>Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated and will contribute to reducing my stress level.

Understand that the Windows installation on your 40gig hd is configured
for the hardware on the newer PC from the motherboard on up.  If you
do this procedure, Windows will go through a hardware shock and attempt
to install drivers for all the hardware on the P100 system.  This can
happen painlessly most of the time, though it will reboot several times
installing drivers.  But, a small percentage of the time you can have a
major catastrophe during this process and find yourself reinstalling
Windows with new drivers for hours.

Okay, if you carry this off remember that it will repeat this process when
you eventually return it to the newer machine.

Personally, I would just put the drive into the P100 machine as a slave
drive to the existing hard drive by changing the pin settings on the drive
and inserting it into the existing ribbon cable.   You may have software
that will need to be reinstalled in order to work, but it is safer in the long
run than to put Windows through hardware shock twice.

    Bob Wright
The NoSpin Group
http://freepctech.com


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