Dual boot hd setup

[JCook1702]

Right now I am running Win 98 on a 5400 rpm 30gb hard drive. It is the Master (only) drive on the primary IDE channel. The secondary IDE channel has a DVD-ROM drive as Master and CD-RW as Slave.

I just bought a 7200 rpm 60 gb hard drive and my plan is to set it up initially as the Slave on the primary channel and to install Windows XP on it. I figure this will allow me to continue running Win 98 while working out any compatibility issues with XP.

Once all is working well, I would switch the drives and make the 7200 rpm drive the Master and the 5400 rpm drive the slave, basicly just to have access to the data that is currently on it.

Any problems with this plan, or any pitfalls to look out for?

Thanks!

[Budfred]

Once you make the switch I believe you will need to edit the boot.ini file so that it doesn't keep asking if you want to boot to Win98 and you are likely to need to make the old drive inactive so that it doesn't confuse the system having the active partition on Slave. You may also want to consider actually transferring the data on the old drive temporarily, wiping it clean and then putting the data back. This way you would be assured that the old Win98 stuff doesn't cause any problems. Also, pay attention to whether you want to format as NTFS or FAT32. If you do the WinXP partition as NTFS, you won't be able to read it from the Win98 partition. You can install as FAT32 and convert to NTFS later however.

You certainly could leave your system set up as a dual boot also, but that would require some tweaking with the drive positions changed.

I would wait to Activate the WinXP install until you switch the drives if you can. The Activation includes a description of your system and while switching the position of the drives isn't a big hardware change, it may be worthwhile to avoid a change in case you want to make other changes in the near future....

Others will know more about it....

[Paul Komski]

If you keep the old HDD (#AA) as master and then install WinXP onto the new one (#BB) AS A DUAL BOOT while (#AA) remains the master, all the boot files will reside on the first active parition of (#AA); your current boot partition.

This means that if you physically reverse master and slave drives in the future that you wont initially be able to boot "normally" from the new master (#BB). You could, at that point, enable booting from the original hdd (#AA) in the BIOS by changing the boot order from HDD0 to HDD1 in the BIOS - or - Run a Repair installation of the WinXP installation (now on HDD0 = #BB) though you would then lose any dual boot options on a startup screen - if that were to be important for you.

Since you dont seem to eventually want a dual boot scenario, you could just install the new HDD as the lone master and install WXP onto it. Then add your old drive as slave to access its data. Should you want to boot from your old OS, you would just have to reverse the HDD boot order in the BIOS to enable booting into (#AA) or (#BB). Having two active partitions like this on SEPARATE HDDs shouldnt cause any problems.

Changing and adding IDE HDDs like this shouldn't create any reactivation problems either. The only time I have seen this happen is after adding a SCSI drive. Even then its not a big deal to reactivate.

Should you want a dual boot setup completely on the new drive, you would first need to clone your old drive to your new one (or do a clean installation of Win9x onto it FIRST) and THEN add WXP to it as a dual boot. Suggest partitioning your new drive first if you want to go this route.

EDIT (correction). Simply adding the SCSI didnt create the need for a reactivation of XP already running on an IDE installation. However, when XP was installed on the SCSI, simply copying the activation files over from the IDE didn't work (as it always has when changing IDE drives) and did require reactivation of the new installation on the SCSI.