HELP....Swapping Windows HD

[tmy023]

Greetings. Older PC with a failing HDm running Win 98. I can't find all the original driver disks. I bought a used 40gig HD, ($20) installed it as slave and got it working. I can copy the contents of my current drive C: to this new drive, swap the jumpers and make the new drive the master, but how do I make it a boot drive?? Will the system auto recognize it when I remove the old drive and boot from it??

thanks

Tom

[ski]

Either of these free HD cloning utilities should facilitate the process:

http://www.miray.de/download/sat.hdclone.html

http://www.pcinspector.de/clone-maxx/uk/welcome.htm

[Paul Komski]

Will the system auto recognize it when I remove the old drive and boot from it??
It should do if:
a) there is no BIOS limitation caused by now having a 40 gig drive (unlikely since you are using the drive as a slave)
b) you clone the old drive onto the new one sector by sector using cloning software.

If you simply copy the files across (or use xcopy from dos) then that wont make the drive bootable and the boot partition would need to be sysed to create a bootable partition boot sector. That partition should also be a primary fat partition and must be the active partition on the drive.

All in all much better to clone after making any current data on the drive safe from being overwritten by the cloning process.

What capacity is the original drive??