Juggling Windows installations across hard drives and partitions

quixotecoyote

Howling to glory I go
Q
Joined
Jun 25, 2006
Messages
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Ok, so here's my situation.

I just bought a computer at a trade show that came with Windows XP installed & has a legit product key.

It's hard drive (new drive) is smaller than the drive I have now (old drive).

I have a old copy of windows 98 on the old drive. The old drive is also partitioned to run a student copy of XP that I don't have the key for anymore and probably shouldn't be using since I no longer attend the instituation that licensed it to me.

What I would like to do is uninstall the old windows on the old drive and move the xp installation from the new drive to the old one.

Any ideas how I could do this?
 
Are you trying to preserve any data on the old drive? If not, try PartedMagic. Just delete the partition(s) on the old drive and copy the partition from the new drive. It's pretty simple.
 
I was trying to preserve the data on my old drive.

Upon further experimentation, this project is further complicated in that the old drive does not want to boot by itself on the new system in XP. It wil boot in 98 fine, but XP makes it flip into the PXE boot mode, whatever that is. Pre-boot something-somethings.
 
If you're just trying to make the new machine primary, why not stick the bigger, old disk in the new box along with the newer, smaller drive?

There are caveats about sharing the same IDE channel as the CD/DVD drive, but aside from that, the hard drive should work fine as 'secondary' (or 'cable select' if your IDE cable has different colored plugs on it).

If you still want to run Win98, I recommend virtual machine software, like VirtualBox. It'll boot up a Win98se image just fine, just not the first version of Win98, at least not with sound support.
 
You may be making this too hard. If your new computer has the room, you should consider just slaving the old drive, or attaching it to the secondary IDE/ATA port. XP can read the data on the Win98 drive just fine.

Also: "The old drive does not want to boot by itself"? Are you saying that, when you try to boot the system with the old drive connected, it's not showing up? If so - if... keep in mind that what follows is invalid if that's not the case - then this could simply be either the BIOS not being set properly to recognize the new drive, or the drive needing to be rejumpered. You can't always just hook up a drive and then boot the system.

Why PXE boot mode is being invoked is a mystery to me. Preboot eXecution Environment is a bootstrapping process to boot off some network resource, not a local disk. So something's really going screwy when that happens.
 
Two both have the right idea for the wrong circumstance. This this is a micro-tower, with only room for one hard drive, hence the juggling and puzzling.

Also: "The old drive does not want to boot by itself"? Are you saying that, when you try to boot the system with the old drive connected, it's not showing up? If so - if... keep in mind that what follows is invalid if that's not the case - then this could simply be either the BIOS not being set properly to recognize the new drive, or the drive needing to be rejumpered. You can't always just hook up a drive and then boot the system.
Click to expand...

No, that's the funky bit. When I hit F10 to force-select a boot device, the hard drive shows. Even if I don't, it recognzies the drive and gets to the XP/98 dual boot screen. If I choose 98 it boots fine, if I choose XP, it reboots and runs PXE.

I have no idea why where it got the setting for a network boot.

I may hassle with this later, but I remembered my dad gave me a 160 gb HD for my birthday in July, which I ignored in favor of the 200 gb drive I was trying to work tonight.

I did a clone of the new drive to the birthday drive and it's working fine. I'm pulling data piecemeal over my home network and it should function. I'll miss those 40 gb after a while, but this was just too bizarre for me to grasp this weekend.
 
Well, get yourself a $20 SATA, Firewire, or USB2, drive enclosure (according to what you have available), stick the drive in, and plug it into the box. You'll have ALL your storage, and a convenient way to back data up and transport it.

SATA would be fastest, but hardest to find a port for on other computers. Maybe not even on your computer.

Firewire (IEEE 1394) is sort of in-between in speed and availability.

USB2 would be the easiest to find a port for, but slowest. Also the cheapest drive enclosures. Plenty 'fast enough' for most applications.
 
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