Hard Drive no longer boots Windows 98

[KennyMonster]

Hi
I have a PC running windows 98 (old I know, but I do wnat to upgrade soon, now that I can afford it).

When trying to add a new hard drive to my PC my primary drive failed and I can no longer boot up windows on it.

My PC detected the drive was there and so I set the jumper to make it a 'slave' drive and made my new drive the primary and installed windows on it, which it did sucessfully, and I can see all my old files, programs etc on the old drive.

1) what can I do to get my old drive bootable again? i.e. should I be checking that certain files are on there.

2) Can I easily transfer the data from my old drive onto the new one so that all my old setting are back available, i.e. outlook express email, hardware settings and added on hardware (graphics card, sound card, cable broadband connection, internet explorer settings and cookies etc.) I have heard that you need ghosting software or something?

Thanks in advance

Kenny

 

[Kevin16]

Most OS's will not allow you to boot from the slave.

make the new hdd slave and the operating hdd master.

 

[KennyMonster]

well the problemn I have is that my old hard drive seems to no longer want to boot windows when set as my master,

I have therefore set my new one as my master and installed windows on it. My old hard drive is then set as slave, I can see on my old hard drive that it all appears to be there but I can't use it properly and I don't want to lose my old setting and information, emails, drivers etc.

Is there something that I can put back onto my old hard drive which will turn it back into a bootable master?

Then after I have done that I would like to transfer everything over to my new hard drive and use that as my master and bin my old one because it seems to be a bit unreliable these days.

 

[Kevin16]

When you added the new hdd, did u leave it on master (default)?

If you leave two drives on master, the BIOS will get confused.

Also, make sure that the master hdd (the one that you want to boot from) is at the end of the ribbon cable.

 

[patio]

All is not lost and the old drive hopefully hasn't been corrupted, and a skevin said the BIOS can get confused.
Here's what you can try. For the time being remove the new drive from the system. If you have a Win98 boot-disk boot from that for this fix.
If not go to Bootdisk.com and download the Win98/custom one which doesn't load a ramdrive as you won't need it here.
At the A: prompt type fdisk/mbr and hit enter.
Remove the floppy and re-boot. This should bring you back to where you were and you can continue on...

patio.