Victor Odhner said:
> I have a computer with Win98 installed, on a disk
> that may be dying.
>
> I have a nice 80GB disk to put on that machine,
> if I can get past the BIOS to use even part of
> it.
Depending on how old it is, It should at least see 8GB, I think. There
are special drivers from the hard drive manufacturers that work with Win98
that allow you to see more than the BIOS limit. It has been too long
since I have mucked with that stuff so I don't remember names. If you
can't see more that that, I'd put a smaller drive in it. It'd be a shame
to use only 10% of the drive.
BTW, Linux does not depend on the BIOS information to learn a hard drive
capacity. Therefore, Linux will use a large drive even if the computer's
BIOS cannot "see" the entire capacity. :^)
> So: If I use parted to create a partition the
> same size as the old disk, how do I copy the
> contents of old to new. A dd command?
> Will that presumably result in a bootable
> partition?
No need to use parted if you use dd to copy the entire old drive. dd will
copy the MBR, including the partition map and you'll end up with the same
sized partition on the new one with the additional capacity as
unpartitioned space. That's how it worked for me the last time I did this
sort of thing going from a 10GB to a 40GB. Here is what I did:
- Connected the new drive as master on the primary IDE (hda) and the old
drive as master on the secondary IDE (hdc). (You can attach them how you
like but the data copy will be a bit faster if the drives are on separate
IDE busses.)
- Boot a Linux CD. (I have used Knoppix or Red Hat Linux emergency CDs in
the past.)
- Did *not* mount the hard drives.
- Did *not* start X.
- Logged in as root
- Issed the following dd command. (Adjust the drive devices to match how
you attached them.)
dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hda bs=512
(This dd command will copy the entire hdc drive to hda starting at LBA 0
which is the Master Boot Record (MBR). It will copy it one block at a
time, which is 512 bytes. The copy will go faster if you specify a block
size larger than 512. But, make sure the size you specify is a multiple
of 512 bytes. You can use 'k' notation, like 'bs=4k' to copy in chunks of
4096 bytes.)
- Waited for the drive LED(s) to stop blinking and the command prompt to
come back. (dd does not provide on-screen life indication as it
progresses. You just have to wait until the command prompt returns.)
- Rebooted from the new drive exactly the same way the old drive used to.
This method has worked well for me many times. Be aware that there are
additional steps to take with Win NT, 2000 or, I presume, XP because they
have stuff in the first blocks of the drive that hinder direct mirroring.
It stores some sort of serial number or something specific to the drive it
was originally installed on. I don't remember what now but there are ways
around it. Will not be a problem for you with Win98.
Caveats: BACKUP important data first. And, YMMV.
Have fun!
Alan
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