lionround said:
My wife has an old puter with 98SE on it. I want to get her a new one, but it will come with XP which she hates. I want to know how to save all of her programs and settings onto the new box without wiping out XP.
First a question: Is your Win98 HDD partitioned, such that the Win98 is in one partition and the programs and files are in a second partition, or do you have only one partition?
If you only have one partition, your options are listed below.
If there is more than one partition, and Win98 is in its own partition, you have the option to reformat the Win98 partition, thereby removing the OS, and install the HDD in the new computer in the primary (0) position of the primary IDE controller, with no other HDD installed and, booting directly to your Win98 CD, reinstall the OS. Upon reboot, the partition will be assigned the drive letter C:. You can then install WinXP HDD in the secondary (1) position of the primary IDE channel,
after you use Partition Magic and BootMagic as described below to create a dual-boot setup.
lionround said:
Can I take her current HD and load it as the Master, hoping I can get all the drivers for the new hardware? Can I use XP's boot loader somehow? Can I use Partition Magic, create separate partitions for each OS?
If the configuration of the new computer, and by that I do not mean just hardware but also MOBO, processor and chip sets, is substantially different than your current Win98 computer, which I would anticipate it is, you may encounter serious problems. I would rule out the possibility of just plugging in the Win98 HDD.
You can use Partition Magic to create a partition and make a clean install of Win98. You can then create a dual boot situation using BootMagic, a boot manager which you can install into its own small partition from the Partition Magic CD (it is not a default installation). BootMagic will then control the boot process and both partitions will be treated as C: which, assuming the XP will be on the C: HDD and Win98 is on a C: HDD, is what you would want.
Using XP to manage the boot process will require reinstalling XP after Win98 is installed, and Win98 would have to be installed as C: to remain consistent with the the old programs and data you want to save, therefore relegating XP to D:. Therefore, as you can see, your situation is a natural for the use of a boot manager.
