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How do I Replace a C drive, when running 2 OS on 2 physical drives? 1

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Liana66

Technical User
Jan 16, 2004
6
CA
My physical C drive has win 98, My physical D drive has Win2000. I would like to replace the C drive with a new 160 GB drive, keep the D drive and let everything run from Win20000. I believe that the C drive has boot.ini. How would I approach this situation? Should I add the third drive, make sure it all works, then later remove the old C drive and let everything reassign itself, thus making the D drive into the C drive? Will that even work? Are there boot settings I should change first? Any advice greatly appreciated. Thanks
 
Quite honestly, I would just install a fresh 2k installation on your new drive with apps etc, transfer what you need from other 2 drives, then wipe them & use one as second (backup?) drive, if that's what you want.

Assuming you have an M$ 'standard' 98/2k dual boot, then yes the C: drive has boot.ini and more importantly the whole of the boot sector (2k's) which loads both operating systems. You could just create a boot sector on the new 160 GB disk (which would be first - C: drive in the machine) which would boot the 2k installation on D:. Just like this:-

Create a 2k boot floppy - copy boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetect.com to newly formatted floppy drive.
disconnect 98 drive and connect new 160G drive in its place - then boot machine using floppy - into 2k. use 2k's disk management to create/format an active partition on new drive (C:). Copy ntldr, ntdetect.com, boot.ini from floppy to root of new partition. Reboot into recovery console - (you'll need administrator password - probably). From there run fixboot c:. Reboot without floppy - machine should boot 2k from on D: drive from new drive. You can then edit boot.ini to remove the 98 entry (usually C:\="Microsoft Windows"). Remember 2k on D: may not boot if you mess with C: partition (but you've always got the floppy).

There are various other approaches you could take - but as I said at top, I'd just start fresh!
 
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