2nd hard drive-boot disc?

[Bikewer]

My wife's old Win98 rig finaly croaked, and it wasn't worth sinking any money into the old fossil. So, we got her a new rig and I pulled the HD out of the old one. (The problem was with the power supply and switching.)

I'd like to stick this HD in my machine, running XP. All the little articles online say that you should put together the pile of floppies XP requires (5-6?) or build a boot disc.

Necessary? Folks swap out hard drives all the time...

And how about the fact that this HD was on a Win98 machine? Any problems with access to the files or incompatibility with the operating systems?
I don't want to just format the drive, it has a lot of info and pictures on it.

 

[Grammatron]

My wife's old Win98 rig finaly croaked, and it wasn't worth sinking any money into the old fossil. So, we got her a new rig and I pulled the HD out of the old one. (The problem was with the power supply and switching.)

I'd like to stick this HD in my machine, running XP. All the little articles online say that you should put together the pile of floppies XP requires (5-6?) or build a boot disc.

Necessary? Folks swap out hard drives all the time...

And how about the fact that this HD was on a Win98 machine? Any problems with access to the files or incompatibility with the operating systems?
I don't want to just format the drive, it has a lot of info and pictures on it.

If you got a new rig it's not necessary to make those floppies as you could boot from CD (provided you have an XP CD or some sort of recovery CD that usually comes with new machines).

XP(NTFS) can indeed read Win98(FAT32) but not the other way around. So basically if you just add the HD to your new computer you can easily read and manipulate the files on it.

 

[Oleron]

I don't understand, if your machine is already running XP then why do you need boot disks at all?

Just hook up the old win98 drive to a spare ide cable (or slave it to the master drive) and boot normally. The drive will automatically be visible in XP as another drive letter.

 

[Bikewer]

A lot of the online tutorials sternly warn that there is a "slight" chance your rig won't fire up when you do such installations.

Thus, the recommendation for the startup discs.

 

[Oleron]

If the system won't boot then a startup disk will not help as the problem is almost certainly in a jumper/BIOS setting.

To avoid problems, install the disk (be careful with the jumpers on the W98 disk, you may need to change to 'Slave') and check if the disk is detected by looking in the BIOS settings.

If both disks are detected OK in the BIOS then XP should boot no problem.

If one or more of the disks is not detected properly then try setting ALL the IDE channels to 'Auto detection'.

 

[jimlintott]

A lot of the online tutorials sternly warn that there is a "slight" chance your rig won't fire up when you do such installations.

They are probably talking about trying to boot the disk in a new box. I've tried this and it doesn't usually work. It sort of boots but gets confused by the new hardware layout. (Linux can usually pull this off though.)

You don't need to boot this disk in the new box though. Just use it as a data disk. This is what I would do:

Jumper it to slave settings (unless you have an open ide port for a master disk.)

Plug it in and reboot. Watch that it is detected on boot. If not you'll have to go into the bios and detect it. (Basically what oleron described above.)

When you have it so that XP can see it. Run a virus scan tool on it.

Copy the data that you want to keep to the new disk.

Reformat the old disk with NTFS, XP's native file format.

Copy the data back and use the old disk for data only.