Second HD with 98se

[Scott]

Not sure on how this would work or even if it might work.

My old man currently runs a stone age desktop running windows 98SE. It has all his work on it on the collosal 4gb HD. However it has various versions of programs he uses on it of which the newer versions have changed features that would make it more difficult to use, he does not have the installation discs for these any longer.

Now im buying him a new desktop which will have XP Pro on it new processor etc....

Now what i would like to do is remove the Harddisc from the old machine and put it in the new machine as a slave/second HD.

Will this work? Im not sure there wont be conflict or anything? Also would i be able to run the old programs he uses from the old HD and just have a shortcut on the desktop?

Any advice/pitfalls then post away

[Mystic]

Data etc will be fine, programs generally wont work because of inconsitancies in the registry (amongst other niggles) although older programs may acctually still work like this. It will just be luck which ones do or dont.

Make sure the new pc still has IDE ports for his old HDD, more & more are becoming SATA complicit (companies just dont seem to care about making things backward compatable any more)

Some of the old programs will probably have .reg files in the installation folder on the drive. If the programs dont run sometimes you can run the .reg file & it updates your registry as if the program has been installed again.

There are some websites which keep old versions of programs too, cant think of any off the top of my head though.

Will mostly be luck though i expect. Good Luck :y:

EDIT: perhaps its .ini, my memories of this are covered in dust ;)

[Alex]

If the drives are set to Master and slave correctly it should boot from XP ok.

If your lucky with the programs being designed for 98 and the settings are saved locally to INI files you can just run them from the 4GB HD, but if settings are saved in the registry you might have to export the settings from the 98 registry, then import into the XP registry.

Might be worth checking if the old versions of the program your dad uses can be found on the net, or him getting used to the new ones.

[Scott]

Shit forgot all about the new machine being sata, ill check that out.

He can use the newer versions of autocad etc... however they dont have some features that the old ones have that would now cost him time to do(not sure on the features as im not interested:P)

Personally I would rather he just used the new HD on its own and the old machine can sit in the loft in case of emergencies plus he has all his data backed up on memory sticks or cd. Hes just being a baby and doesnt want to change his old stinky P3 machine. Was one of the first P3's in the country back then and i dread to think how much he paid for it back then:P

Thanks lads

[Connor_scotland]

I tried to this recently with my old machine put the HDD in my new pc but the new PC is SATA :-(

[b0t13]

how u check if ya current HD is sata or IDE?

[Alex]

how u check if ya current HD is sata or IDE?

By the type of connection, IDE is a big ribbon cable, Sata tends to be a little red cable.

[Scott]

bah new one is defo Sata, it may have the option of IDE on teh board but i doubt it.

Oh well time for the old boy to get his wallet out for the latest autocad etc...:P

[CHRI5]

you could run a dual boot system, only boot into win98 when he needs to. i did this on a few systems when xp initially came out.

[Scott]

thats only going to confuse him, plus the new machine appears to be SATA only.

Anyway i can rip a whole program from the old HD onto the new one? long shot maybe but not sure on the answer

[CHRI5]

Dual boot isnt that hard really, just picking which os you want on startup of the pc. In simple terms all you would need to do is create a partition (say 5 gigs) on the new sata drive for win98 to sit on, then ghost the entire old drive onto that partition.

On another note, you could use Virtual PC (you would need a Windows 98 cd), it basically emulates another Operating System, while your using Windows XP. Then you may be able to get those programs to run in there.

If you dont want to go down that route, you may be lucky just copying the C:Program Files folders over making sure you bring hidden/system files aswell, and as people have already said tweak the registry and if your lucky some of the programs may well run under xp. I have done this before also, for some programs I needed to re-enter serial numbers again, etc... but they then ran ok after that, more complex programs may not be as kind.

[Scott]

it wont be complicated for me to run dual boot but for the old man i may as well walk on the ceiling:P

I fancy ripping all the files onto a disc and giving it a bash that way, always enjoyed a bit of investigating:P

[Alex]

thats only going to confuse him, plus the new machine appears to be SATA only.

Anyway i can rip a whole program from the old HD onto the new one? long shot maybe but not sure on the answer

You could always do as above, copy the program folder to the new pc, try running the program and see if any errors pop-up, there might be a few "File is missing" errors, but then just copy those files from 98.
If it looks like some settings are not there then you might need to export-import some registry.

Using Virtual PC is a good idea, but then you have to boot XP, then boot 98 within XP before your dad can run this program.

[Scott]

i think ill give ripping the files over a bash and see how that goes. Either that or he shells out the few hundred/thousand? quid for the latest autocad which has now taken these old features that they used to have and brought them back :err:

[CHRI5]

Let us know how you get on. I dont know how long these licences last for your programs but if the programs were purchased originally, free web updates/upgrades may be possible, you never know!