Dual OS

[Hogans_Alley]

I have two drives with WIN98SE on both. I'd like to fdisk the secondary (slave) drive, format it and install WINxp. Eventually, I'll operate both drives on WINxp.

Hogans Alley

[deadnight]

Why have an OS on both?

[Hogans_Alley]

Because I'm not really confident about my ability to successfully shift to XP. I'm keeping the 98SE until I know that I have  successfully loaded the XP in the slave HD. Then I would make that my master, loading all the existing peripherals in it. Subsequently, I'll fdisk the existing master, format it and then install it as slave.

By the way I have a couple of questions. (1) My window files, because of upgrades and such over time now exceed 800MB which no longer fit in a standard CD-R disc. What's the best way to keep an updated copy of WIN98SE? Use two CD-Rs?
(2) Do I need a start-up disc in order to load XP? When I first tried it, after typing "D:\ setup", it kept warning me about file not found. However, when I tried to load it over 98SE, I never had any problem going thru the install process. Of course I exited because I want to load XP in an fdisked and formatted HD. The MS Upgrade Advisor listed a whole bunch of imcompatability issues if I upgrade vs. starting from scratch.

Hogans Alley

[deadnight]

That makes sense. I recently upgraded from 98 to xp also. I got the xp upgrade instead of the full though.  So I just put in the cd and let it run and it insalled without a problem. A little bit different than installing the OS from scratch though. Probably the only OS I installed from scratch is windows 95 which was a long time ago.

I suggest going to the D prompt by typing 'D:'  then type '/dir'   (I think that is the commands for it, havn't done anything in dos for a long time) Then you can see all the files on the cd. Then look for a setup.exe or install.exe or something like that. Make sure it isn't burried in the folders.  

Another thing you might want to try is just booting the computer up with the cd in the drive. It might automatically goto a setup.

You don't have the original windows 98 cd? Not sure what you can do with that. Maybe try zipping the files with high compression. I'm thinking that most of the windows files are in .cab format allready compressed anyways. Might not hurt to try though. Other than that You could get a zip drive. Quite expensive though. Or maybe even a small external HD to hold the OS files in. One that plugs into the USB port.

good luck