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Grex Micros Item 177: Help changing Windows 95 boot disk
Entered by jep on Sun Nov 2 21:53:06 UTC 1997:

I need a little help.

I have Windows 95, with a 540 MB badly partitioned drive.

I have recently purchased a 420 MB IDE drive.  I want to format the
420 drive from the 540 and make it bootable, and copy over the files
I want from the 540 to the 420, then reformat the 540 MB drive.

I formatted the 420 MB drive using DOS mode and "format d:/s", then
used XCOPY C:\*.* D:\ /E to copy over all the files from the C
partition on the 540 MB drive, then switched the two drives so the 420
MB is my primary boot drive.  It booted in DOS mode.  It wouldn't run
Windows 95.

Where did I go wrong, and what should I have done?

I installed Windows 95 from an upgrade disk.  I no longer have Windows
3.xx, so I can't install DOS and Windows and run the upgrade again.  I
guess I can probably get some Windows disks from somewhere, and
install DOS+Windows, run the upgrade, reinstall all of my software,
and eventually accomplish what I need, but that seems like an awful
lot of reinstalling.

4 responses total.

#1 of 4 by scott on Mon Nov 3 00:19:25 1997:

 Could you do a full backup from your current hard drive?  Then create 
an emergency boot floppy in windows 95, swap hard disks, boot from the 
emergency floppy, and then restore?  I'm not sure this would work, but 
it may be worth a try.

#2 of 4 by scg on Mon Nov 3 00:19:56 1997:

You probably didn't get the Registry copied over right.

#3 of 4 by jep on Mon Nov 3 14:05:48 1997:

Will the backup program work from hard drives of two different sizes
and with different partitioning information?  My old drive has two 
partitions; about 200 MB and about 340 MB.  The newer drive is one
single partition.

How would I fix the registry, if that's all I need to do?

#4 of 4 by jep on Tue Nov 11 17:29:22 1997:

I found an answer that worked for me, at 
http://www.comoxvalley.com/solutions/transfer.htm:

1. format the new drive with system files - /s and set it as a slave to 
your old drive 

2. turn off virtual memory -in System Properties, click on the 
Perfomance tab. If you have 16 mb ram or more, just disable virtual 
memory. If you have 12 mb or less, move the swap file to the new drive. 
Win95 needs 12 mb ram, either actual or virtual to run. If you skip this 
step, xcopy will fail when it encounters the swap file 

3. in a Dos window, type xcopy C:\*.* /e /h /k /r D: This will copy over 
all of the system & hidden files. 

4. set your new drive as C: and reboot

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