Installing master and slave drives

[Sinton]

I have recently brought a new computer with Windows XP installed on it and at work I have been getting hard drives from peoples old computers and putting them in their new ones. I have no troubles in doing this but what I do want to know is if my old hardrive has windows 98 installed on it and is installed on my windows XP system as a slave drive will it interupt with windows XP?

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

No ... well it shouldn't anyway. The slave will behave just like a "dumb" storage device. I don't know what would happen if you started double clicking on some of the Win98 executables though.


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[ComputerDoctorBFG]

Windows XP will not detect Windows 98 on boot up because it is on a seperate drive. If however you had a partition with win 98 on your C drive then it can.

The files that are on your old drive will be readable within XP but any programmes installed will not. I suggest backup the files that u want to keep of the old hard drive and format it NTFS and then use it as a storage device within XP.

 

[johnwm]

Most Win98 executables will run from an XP operating system, even without being reinstalled. There are very few DLLs in 98 that have not survived into XP. XP will not differentiate between a second partition on your main drive and a separate hard drive as far as booting is concerned.

Good Luck
johnwm
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[geekEE]

Even though most Win98 executables will run under XP, in this case, I would say that it's unlikely that they would run. First of all, they were installed on a hard drive when it was a master (most likely a C: drive). If it is now made a slave drive (D: or higher), any configuration files created may have incorrect paths. Secondly, the XP registry will not have any entries that may be required for the application.

 

[johnwm]

Have you had a bad experience with this? I have used this on many computers and only rarely needed to re-install. As long as the DLLs are installed (and no program-specific DLLs that were installed in the old SYSTEM/SYSTEM32 directory are required) then any well-behaved program will recreate its own config files/registry entries if they don't already exist. Often the program-specific files will be in the program's own directory (or below it), which also lessens the problems.

Good Luck
johnwm
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[geekEE]

Well, it seems like I had less luck than you, johnwm. It must have been the particular applications that I was trying to run. Well, there is no harm in Sinton simply trying to run the apps and seeing what happens. Actually, in reading his original post, I'm not sure whether he needs to do that or not.