need help copying 2g drive to 8g drive

[marcus_mpls]

I am trying to duplicate a Win98 2.1g drive onto a replacement 8g drive for a friend of mine. Starting from scratch with a new OS installation is not an option for a few reasons I won't go into here. I tried copying the entire disk from windows explorer (to preserve long file names), and it worked fine, but gave himem.sys errors (see my thread on that topic if you might be able to help with THAT little issue).

Anyway, is there a way to copy the entire drive (or ghost the image) to the larger drive and have a single bootable 8g partition? Both disks are Fat32.

Thanks!

[golfcart]

What brand of drive is the 8 gig?

[NDC]

Correct me if I'm wrong (been a while since I've cloned Win98), but I don' t think simply copying Win98, programs files, etc will make the destination drive bootable. You will need to use a disk imaging program such as Norton Ghost where the boot sectors are copied to the ring of the destination disk. The disk
Ring area is not visible to the user so the MBR cannot be copied by simply using commands or drag-n-drop methods..

You could probably use the FDISK /MBR command also to write the MBR to the destination disk and then try copying all the files and folders. Make sure to change all the attributes in the roor of the drive so all hidden files will be copied to the destination hard drive as well...

[John Prophet]

Welcome to the forum. But please dont double (or triple) post a problem. Your other post isnt even off the first page yet....give someone a minute to answer before you ask again, ok? lol.

Norton ghost is really what you need. Or maybe even one of the free copying programs that come with most new hard drives.

or maybe someone else will post a link to a freeware cloning program.

But in general, "dragging and dropping" wont really work...because of the master boot record and things like that..youll just get all sorts of errors.

you might could ATTEMPT to take a w98 bootdisk..made off of the working machine..and boot to the boot floppy, then run a:\fdisk /mbr that will rewrite the master boot recored....then maybe you could try "a:\sys c:"

But I think you just need to use an imaging program like ghost.

Plus, if you are just taking a disk from one machine and putting it into another, all of the hardware in the two machines are different...so there will be all kinds of problems....what you have to do is run "regedit" and then delete the "hkey local machine\enum" folder....that will make window redetect all of the hardware on the new machine..and its a lobg process to redetect it all...lots of reboots.......and you will still need the windows disk when it asks for the drivers etc.

It is possible that the original working machine has a folder usually called "w98" that has the"cab files" from the windows disk in it.....a lot of system builders put the cab files from the W98 disk into a folder on the hard drive so that when it asks you for the w98 disk, you just point it to the folder instead. If you have that folder with the cab files in it....its just as good as having the w98 disk.

JP

[marcus_mpls]

Golfcart: It's a Seagate ST38421A (8.4G unformatted)

NDC: I did a SYS:/D from the original drive to copy the system files. Between that and selecting all hidden files in windows explorer they did all seem to get copied just fine.

John: I kinda considered these to be two seperate issues relating to two different forums, but you point is taken about double posting.

I looked on ZDNet for a freeware cloning program, but the free ones don't seem to allow cloning to a larger drive. I'm not worried about the hardware differences - I think I can handle that, and worst case they can just switch machines.

Thanks! Any other suggestions?

[John Prophet]

Did the freeware progs say anything specifically about cloning to bigger drives? Because my first guess would be that they all would be able to do that.

Otherwise it would be sort of weird to limit cloning only to drives that were the same size..?

Norton Ghost just resizes it automatically etc.

Does anyone know if any of the Maxtor or seagate or WD software would work here? I know some of the drive makers put the software for download on their sites, but possibly it works only on their own drives etc. Not sure cuz Ive never used anything but ghost.

JP

[marcus_mpls]

I just checked Seagate and Maxtor. No luck in either place. Maxtor's will only uwork on their disks and Seagate doesnt actually say that their software will clone to a larger drive. I'm already into this project way more than I anticipated, so I'm just going to give the PCs back to their owner and call it a day. They can bring it to the geek squad or some other service that does this stuff daily and has a handful of tools.

sigh...

Thanks everyone for your help.

[John Prophet]

quote---> Seagate doesnt actually say that their software will clone to a larger drive.


Dude, I think you are letting this hang you up when you shouldnt be....I think they EXPECT that 95% of users will be doing exactly that!! going from small to upgraded larger size.....there is no WAY they would put out software for consumers that made you have two exact same sized drives! lol.

Do you have a spare drive to try it on?? try it and see what happens.

JP

[meese]

Nothing like double posting

http://www.techimo.com/forum/t84179.html

[Chuckiechan]

Does anyone have a DOS book?

I think he needs Format: x/s

and then xcopy y:x

X being destination
Y being source

I just can't find the systax anymore...

Edit:
/S being system files. Not sure if they clone over with xcopy.