Tricky Win98 Format

Hello everyone,

It's been a very long time since I've been on Usenet, so please
forgive any netiquette faux pas...

I have what might be a bit of a tricky format of a Win98 machine...

It's P200MMX with two HDs. The master drive is the older and slower of
the two, and contains the system files; the slave is the newer and
faster, and has windows installed on it.

I'd like to format both drives, click the newer faster one onto
'master' and install windows (98) onto it in full (i.e. a normal
install, with system files and the program on the this one drive). I'd
like to switch the older and slower HD to slave and leave it as just
an internal backup, as storage only.

So my question is, what should I do, and I guess at least as
importantly, in what order should I do it? I'm worried about
formatting the wrong drive first, and then being 'stuck' without
control of the machine to finish the format/reinstall.

As you can see I really don't know a lot about this kind of thing, and
although I've tried to research the different aspects of this problem
separately, the fact that what I'm trying to do is a little convoluted
isn't helping.

OK, I've searched this group as well as I can, but apologies if this
has been answered before.

I'll check this group as often as I can (twice a week at least) and
give extra details/clarification as they're needed.

Thanking you in advance,

Wawrzyniec.

wrote:
Hello everyone,

It's been a very long time since I've been on Usenet, so please
forgive any netiquette faux pas...

I have what might be a bit of a tricky format of a Win98 machine...

It's P200MMX with two HDs. The master drive is the older and slower of
the two, and contains the system files; the slave is the newer and
faster, and has windows installed on it.

I'd like to format both drives, click the newer faster one onto
'master' and install windows (98) onto it in full (i.e. a normal
install, with system files and the program on the this one drive). I'd
like to switch the older and slower HD to slave and leave it as just
an internal backup, as storage only.

So my question is, what should I do, and I guess at least as
importantly, in what order should I do it? I'm worried about
formatting the wrong drive first, and then being 'stuck' without
control of the machine to finish the format/reinstall.

As you can see I really don't know a lot about this kind of thing, and
although I've tried to research the different aspects of this problem
separately, the fact that what I'm trying to do is a little convoluted
isn't helping.

OK, I've searched this group as well as I can, but apologies if this
has been answered before.

I'll check this group as often as I can (twice a week at least) and
give extra details/clarification as they're needed.

Thanking you in advance,

Wawrzyniec.

Not too tricky.

FIRST save all your data to an external repositry and make sure you can read
it, formatting the drives will destroy ALL the material on the drives.

Swap the jumpers on the two drives so that the faster disk is the master and
the slower slave.

Boot your machine with a Win 98 boot disk (http://www.bootdisk.com).

Type FDISK then delete and recreate the required partion/s on each drive,
reboot the machine from the floppy.

Type Format c: /u, once C: is formatted do the same for D:.

Reboot the machine from the floppy, place the win98 CD in the CD drive, type
X: (where X: is the letter of your CD drive (probably E: in your case)) then
Enter, next type CD win98 and hie enter, next type SETUP and hit Enter and
you are on your way.

Once installed you will probaly need to instal motherboard, sound, video
etc. drives. Then you software and printer drives etc.

If retaining whatever's already on the hard disks is not an issue then it's
pretty straightforward. Before starting ...

Insure you have the product registration key required to do the reinstall.

Create an Emergency Boot Floppy, far right tab under Add/Remove Programs in
control panel under 98SE. Insure it works, e.g. use it to boot the pc (may
require changing boot order in BIOS) and also insure you can see files on a
cd after booting with the floppy, e.g. choose CD Rom support when starting
pc. Note - boot floppy creates a ram drive which pushes drive letter for CD
drive down one spot, e.g. if CD was E under Windows it's F when using boot
floppy at DOS prompt.

Insure you have device specific drivers you might need for your hardware and
that they've been copied onto floppy or burned to a cd for later use, e.g.
modem, network, video etc. drivers.

Shut down and change master/slave jumpers on hard disk.

Boot using floppy. Check (change) in FDISK that the "new" master hard disk
is marked Active (else it won't work to boot pc). Format both drives, e.g.
FORMAT C and FORMAT D. There's no real need to erase and recreate
partitions.

Run "SYS C:" to make primary hard disk bootable, e.g. has system files
required to boot. Note - not neccessary but I like to insure disk will boot
and removes need for floppy little earlier in sequence..

To save time later make a new folder on the newly formatted C drive and then
copy the Win98 folder off the install cd. e.g. example commands follow while
at the DOS prompt (probably A:\), ignore comments after each line

C: (change to the C drive)
MD WIN98 (create a WIN98 folder)
CD WIN98 (change into that folder)
COPY F:\WIN98\*.* (C & D are hard disks, E is ram drive boot floppy
creates so F is cd drive)

You now have the install files all sitting on your hard disk in a WIN98
folder. Reboot pc without floppy in (why did SYS C: in earlier step). Once
pc is back to C:\ prompt change into the WIN98 folder (cd win98) and run
SETUP. Nice thing about copying folder from cd to hard disk is never have
annoyance of requiring Windows CD when installing drivers etc. sometime in
the future.

Think that's it.

wrote in message
...
Hello everyone,

It's been a very long time since I've been on Usenet, so please
forgive any netiquette faux pas...

I have what might be a bit of a tricky format of a Win98 machine...

It's P200MMX with two HDs. The master drive is the older and slower of
the two, and contains the system files; the slave is the newer and
faster, and has windows installed on it.

I'd like to format both drives, click the newer faster one onto
'master' and install windows (98) onto it in full (i.e. a normal
install, with system files and the program on the this one drive). I'd
like to switch the older and slower HD to slave and leave it as just
an internal backup, as storage only.

So my question is, what should I do, and I guess at least as
importantly, in what order should I do it? I'm worried about
formatting the wrong drive first, and then being 'stuck' without
control of the machine to finish the format/reinstall.

As you can see I really don't know a lot about this kind of thing, and
although I've tried to research the different aspects of this problem
separately, the fact that what I'm trying to do is a little convoluted
isn't helping.

OK, I've searched this group as well as I can, but apologies if this
has been answered before.

I'll check this group as often as I can (twice a week at least) and
give extra details/clarification as they're needed.

Thanking you in advance,

Wawrzyniec.

wrote in message
...
Hello everyone,

It's been a very long time since I've been on Usenet, so please
forgive any netiquette faux pas...

I have what might be a bit of a tricky format of a Win98 machine...

It's P200MMX with two HDs. The master drive is the older and slower of
the two, and contains the system files; the slave is the newer and
faster, and has windows installed on it.

I'd like to format both drives, click the newer faster one onto
'master' and install windows (98) onto it in full (i.e. a normal
install, with system files and the program on the this one drive). I'd
like to switch the older and slower HD to slave and leave it as just
an internal backup, as storage only.

So my question is, what should I do, and I guess at least as
importantly, in what order should I do it? I'm worried about
formatting the wrong drive first, and then being 'stuck' without
control of the machine to finish the format/reinstall.

As you can see I really don't know a lot about this kind of thing, and
although I've tried to research the different aspects of this problem
separately, the fact that what I'm trying to do is a little convoluted
isn't helping.

OK, I've searched this group as well as I can, but apologies if this
has been answered before.

I'll check this group as often as I can (twice a week at least) and
give extra details/clarification as they're needed.

Thanking you in advance,

Wawrzyniec.


Heck, I'd just format the faster drive
then clone the system drive to it.

xxcopy /clone should do the trick

http://www.xxcopy.com/index.htm


It should save a ton of time

wrote:

It's been a very long time since I've been on Usenet, so please
forgive any netiquette faux pas...

Your netiquette will show once you start replying. Poor netiquette is
when you top-post, or when you include the entire post that you're
replying to instead of editing it to include only the specific content
you're replying to.

All of the 3 replies so far have shown poor netiquette.

Observe how I am constructing this reply as an example of good
netiquette.

It's P200MMX with two HDs.
I'd like to format both drives, click the newer faster one onto
'master' and install windows (98) onto it in full (i.e. a normal
install, with system files and the program on the this one drive).

If both drives are as old as your motherboard and CPU (ie circa 2000
or older) then you are advised to NOT keep using them. Your drives
have reached the end of their useful life and will most likely fail
within the next year. They probably have developed many bad sectors,
and are probably very noisy (ie they probably emit a very noticable
high-pitched tone that can affect your hearing over time - but that's
probably already happened by now).

Go out and purchase a new hard drive. Even if it's a 40 gb drive, you
can partition and format it as a 32 gb drive (your motherboard
probably isin't compatible with a drive larger than 32 gb).

OK, I've searched this group as well as I can, but apologies if
this has been answered before.

Everybody that wants to alter the configuration of their old systems
is in a slightly different situation, but it always boils down to a
desire to re-use old hard drives, without considering that the hard
drive is the one system component that can be replaced, and that it
makes sense to replace it because they will fail, and replacing them
can be very inexpensive.

wrote in message
...

I'd like to format both drives, click the newer faster one onto
'master' and install windows (98) onto it in full (i.e. a normal
install, with system files and the program on the this one drive). I'd
like to switch the older and slower HD to slave and leave it as just
an internal backup, as storage only.

So my question is, what should I do, and I guess at least as
importantly, in what order should I do it?

1: Data: we assume you need save nothing, i.e. no
data from the old drives including ProductKey or
ProductID (numbers you must input during installation,
described in #3.)

1b. Test your boot floppy beforehand, i.e. boot from
the floppy and verify that it enables the CD drive(s)
under MS-DOS (required to instal Win98.) If in doubt,
download the correct boot floppy from www.bootdisk.com.
This sends you a single EXE file which you execute to
write the bootup files to a new blank formatted floppy.
This may lack one or two convenient utilities e.g.
CHKDSK or EDIT which you can add to the floppy.

2: Hardware. It does not matter how the two hard
drives are connected (master/slave settings) so long as
the OS finds only one Primary DOS partition (which will
be your C: drive.) This is done via FDISK on your booting
floppy i.e.
-- Load FDISK and identify which of your two HDDs is the
fast one. (Rename unambiguously if needed.)
-- Load the fast HDD and remove all partitions (drives).
-- Create one Primary DOS partition which will be your
C: drive, of appropriate size (2 Gb to 10 Gb depending
on drive space available and how you plan to instal.)
-- Make one Extended DOS partition using up the
rest of the drive space. You can make two or more
logical drives in this Ext DOS partition if you prefer.
(E.g. your Windows swap file (extended memory)
should be on the faster HDD, but not in drive C: if
there is any risk of C: filling up with data.)
-- Load the slow HDD, remove all partitions, make
all the drive space a single Ext DOS partition, and
make 2 or more logical drives within it if you prefer.
-- Reboot to execute all these changes to the
hard drives.
-- Each logical drive must be FORMATted before
you can write data to it or instal the OS.

3: Operating System installation: read first reliable
instructions at
http://home.satx.rr.com/badour/html/w98_restore.html

--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)

"98 Guy" wrote in message ...

It's P200MMX with two HDs.
I'd like to format both drives, click the newer faster one onto
'master' and install windows (98) onto it in full (i.e. a normal
install, with system files and the program on the this one drive).

If both drives are as old as your motherboard and CPU (ie circa 2000
or older) then you are advised to NOT keep using them. Your drives
have reached the end of their useful life and will most likely fail
within the next year. They probably have developed many bad sectors,

The OP need not take this at face value. We have no reason to
suppose drives that have not yet generated a single bad sector
" probably have developed many bad sectors" and we need
not guess. Reputable HDD manufacturers distribute free on
their web sites diagnostic apps that will reliably indicate whether
a drive is suitable for further use.

Go out and purchase a new hard drive. Even if it's a 40 gb drive, you
can partition and format it as a 32 gb drive (your motherboard
probably isin't compatible with a drive larger than 32 gb).

Users with slower CPUs are better advised to divide drive
space into several logical drives (e.g. max 10 Gb each),
planning ahead where various types of data will be stored, e.g.
C: drive 2 Gb for Windows only
D: drive 10 Gb for /Program Files
E: drive 10 Gb for /My Documents and all other data written
by apps in D: (e.g. income tax, family photos etc.)
F: drive for the Windows swap file (Extended Memory) and
for periodical backup (e.g. XXCOPY clone of drive C:,
e.g. cumulative backup of new or changed data from E

Archives of this NG include occasional discussion
along these lines.

--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)

Supposed Netiquette is a term spouted by parties who are ignorant of how
the Internet works and how information is collected by the search engines.
The only place it still applies are chat groups, or discussions which
contain no technical materials which needs referenced.

You generally find these statements by parties who love to talk theory;
or attempt ot place themselves above others by pointing to supposed
netiquette breach;
or spend large amounts of time posting in dozens of News Groups and forums
and wish to decrease their download times and increase rapid reading of
posts;
or of course the most obvious, those who do frequently chat [basically
worthless material] and that's what they carry with them as the belief of
how other discussions should be handled... when in reality, search engines
don't care about this figment of old forum ideals, they find and place
information based upon the actual materials contained within the individual
pages [that's each posting for groups such as this] found.
Remove that needed data, and what might have been a viable search results,
turns into a "gotta read the entire thread to understand" worthless rambling
in some thread which receives no attention, and fails to achieve the results
because the title provides the same basic information that hundreds of
thousands of other like discussions also contain. It might provide help for
one individual or a single discussion, whereas, had the data been retained,
it might have help thousands of others.

There are also those who foster this fallacy so they can post numerous
references to their own prior postings as if they are the premier authority
[you are locallized to their presentations rather than where that material
came from].

That is not stating one should not clip data in technical or informational
discussions which is not being addressed or has already been answered if
that is no longer being discussed, unless it is relevant to the continued
discussion.

As for where one posts, that depends upon what is presented. Such as this
is a deliberate top post but keeps the thread below it for posterity and
reference of why it was posted.

Note the below reference to netiquette and some other inadequately prepared
advise contained below which is a standard "consumerism" response. Re-use
your hard drives if possible, but backup, and prepare for future failures.

--
MEB
http://peoplescounsel.orgfree.com
________


"98 Guy" wrote in message ...
| wrote:
|
| It's been a very long time since I've been on Usenet, so please
| forgive any netiquette faux pas...
|
| Your netiquette will show once you start replying. Poor netiquette is
| when you top-post, or when you include the entire post that you're
| replying to instead of editing it to include only the specific content
| you're replying to.
|
| All of the 3 replies so far have shown poor netiquette.
|
| Observe how I am constructing this reply as an example of good
| netiquette.
|
| It's P200MMX with two HDs.
| I'd like to format both drives, click the newer faster one onto
| 'master' and install windows (98) onto it in full (i.e. a normal
| install, with system files and the program on the this one drive).
|
| If both drives are as old as your motherboard and CPU (ie circa 2000
| or older) then you are advised to NOT keep using them. Your drives
| have reached the end of their useful life and will most likely fail
| within the next year. They probably have developed many bad sectors,
| and are probably very noisy (ie they probably emit a very noticable
| high-pitched tone that can affect your hearing over time - but that's
| probably already happened by now).
|
| Go out and purchase a new hard drive. Even if it's a 40 gb drive, you
| can partition and format it as a 32 gb drive (your motherboard
| probably isin't compatible with a drive larger than 32 gb).
|
| OK, I've searched this group as well as I can, but apologies if
| this has been answered before.
|
| Everybody that wants to alter the configuration of their old systems
| is in a slightly different situation, but it always boils down to a
| desire to re-use old hard drives, without considering that the hard
| drive is the one system component that can be replaced, and that it
| makes sense to replace it because they will fail, and replacing them
| can be very inexpensive.

You don't want to do anything to the "old" drive except move it to the Slave
position on the IDE cable, change the jumper(s), etc. WHEN you need to start
up the old system, you'll have to switch it back to being the Master. Or,
you can use a third-party boot manager. Also, I'd leave this drive
disconnected until you've finished reinstalling Windows to the new drive.
Prevents possibly confusing issues.

You said the newer drive already has Windows installed. Is that correct? If
so, then I'm confused. If not, then once you've moved that drive to being
the Master, you treat it like any other drive and clean install Windows.
Lots of ways to do that, including the way I described to another person a
couple of days ago (subject: "Install Win98 SE".)

But MAINLY, before you do ANYTHING, you want to make sure that any files you
want to save are on the old drive, since it's the one you aren't going to
wipe.

--
Gary S. Terhune
MS-MVP Shell/User
www.grystmill.com

wrote in message
...
Hello everyone,

It's been a very long time since I've been on Usenet, so please
forgive any netiquette faux pas...

I have what might be a bit of a tricky format of a Win98 machine...

It's P200MMX with two HDs. The master drive is the older and slower of
the two, and contains the system files; the slave is the newer and
faster, and has windows installed on it.

I'd like to format both drives, click the newer faster one onto
'master' and install windows (98) onto it in full (i.e. a normal
install, with system files and the program on the this one drive). I'd
like to switch the older and slower HD to slave and leave it as just
an internal backup, as storage only.

So my question is, what should I do, and I guess at least as
importantly, in what order should I do it? I'm worried about
formatting the wrong drive first, and then being 'stuck' without
control of the machine to finish the format/reinstall.

As you can see I really don't know a lot about this kind of thing, and
although I've tried to research the different aspects of this problem
separately, the fact that what I'm trying to do is a little convoluted
isn't helping.

OK, I've searched this group as well as I can, but apologies if this
has been answered before.

I'll check this group as often as I can (twice a week at least) and
give extra details/clarification as they're needed.

Thanking you in advance,

Wawrzyniec.

Don Phillipson wrote:

It's P200MMX with two HDs.

If both drives are as old as your motherboard and CPU (ie circa
2000 or older) then you are advised to NOT keep using them.
Your drives have reached the end of their useful life and will
most likely fail within the next year.
They probably have developed many bad sectors,

The OP need not take this at face value.

Don and the OP are advised to do a little research of their own and
discover the average and typical lifespans of hard drives of various
vintages.

We have no reason to suppose drives that have not yet generated
a single bad sector

The odds of such a supposition are against you.

Reputable HDD manufacturers distribute free on their web sites
diagnostic apps that will reliably indicate whether
a drive is suitable for further use.

I don't dispute that, and I look forward to the OP performing such a
test and posting the results back here. It not even necessary to use
manufacturer-specific software for that purpose.

I stand by my generic advice, which is that the OP obtain a new (or
reasonably new) 20 or 40 gb drive, install 98 on it, and copy personal
files from his ancient drives onto the new drive, and put the old
drives in a shoe box in the closet.

Users with slower CPUs are better advised to divide drive
space into several logical drives (e.g. max 10 Gb each),

I find such a strategy to be quaint - reminiscent of the pre-windows
era where the creation of many logical drives had some utility.