Added second hard drive, New OS possible?

[PtBetsie]

I purchased a Seagate hard drive (160G) and followed the Seagate instructions and their software to install it. One of my choices was to make the new drive the boot drive. I chose yes as I wanted to install Windows XP; Win98SE is on the old drive and I would like to have it be accessible. The program copied not just the boot sequence but all the files from the WIN98 hard drive. If I install XP, I believe it will format the drive again wiping out those files. Is this correct? If/When it does reformat the newer 160G during the XP install, will I be able to read the slave hard drive later? What should I do to make both drives readable? I don't want to boot up from the smaller dirve but would like to access all it's programs.
During the install while setting the partitions with the Seagate software, I had to choose between Fat32, NT, etc. I chose FAT 32. Was this correct? There were also mulitiple choices for cluster sizes. What should I have chosen and can this be changed later if I picked the wrong ones?

With these upgrades I also have a video question but will post that in another fourm.

[Paul Komski]

It sounds like the drive was cloned by the Seagate software. When this happens the original partition is often hidden by the software - so to advise on how to proceed some info is necessary - notably which drive is currently the boot hard drive - the 160 or the original - and whether the original Win98 partition is hidden and needs to be unhidden in order to access it from anywhere.

If you install WinXP it will only delete any partitions that you specify prior to proceeding with the installation.

There are two general approaches to dual booting Win98 and WinXP. One uses the Win98 drive as the common system drive and you still boot to it as before but install WinXP onto the 160 as slave from the small drive which still is the master. This is the MS method and the boot files (notably boot.ini which contains the dual boot menu) reside on the small drive but the windows XP partition and main installation is on the large drive. To go this route you need to backtrack and get Win98 working from the small drive - all on its own. Then slave the 160 and then boot to the WinXP setup CD. Delete or reformat any partitions in existence on the 160 and then recreate the partition you want to install WinXP onto on the 160.

The alternative is to use a boot manager such as BiNG or XOSL to choose between the two hard drives and to have two separate installations each on its own dedicated drive with the boot processes for both separate and only controlled by the boot manager.

Please make a BiNG boot floppy or CD (in my sig) and boot to it without installing it for now but go into Partition Work. Select the Win98 partition on the smaller drive and choose Properties. It should show a FAT32 format. If this is described as hidden then hit the Unhide button.

Having done that replace the smaller drive as the only drive and check that you can boot to it as before. If that works OK then add the new drive as slave and reboot to BiNG and delete any partitions on the large new drive.

It next depends whether you go the MS way or the 3rd Party way. If you go the MS way next simply boot to the WinXP CD and then choose to install into the now empty new drive and XP will set up a dual boot menu for you as part of the installation process. Make sure you choose New installation and not Upgrade at the start of setup. (Please also note that you must have an installation CD with SP1 or SP2 to access all of the 160 gig drive this being greater than the 48bit LBA 127gig threshold). If you want to go the 3rd Party Route post back.