Transferring Files & O/S to Second Disk

I have an old Caviar 80 MB HDD with DOS 5.0 and a DOS based records management system and files that I want to copy over to another old Hard drive. The other drive is a CONNOR 500 MB. I want to make the 500 MB Drive the bootable drive with the DOS programs on it. It will be slipped into a 486 at a later date.

Here's my dilemma - I am running Win98 SE on a Gigabyte Board with an AMD 750 CPU and 128 MB Ram. This BIOS recognizes the two older drives but will not boot to them - to either one. So, I boot into my Win98 and everything is fine.

How through Win 98 can I copy the contents of the 80 MB drive intact to my system hard drive, then copy the DOS information onto the second drive so that it becomes a bootable, stand alone drive and will run this DOS based program. Any Ideas?

I could try DISKCOPY from the 80MB to my 20GB But then how do I get it to the 500 MB Drive - because that will remove everything off my 20 GB won't it?.

I need some suggestions please.... or am I out to lunch on this?

if the 80MB drive is already bootable, there's really no reason your machine won't boot from it-- if you take the drive you usually use out of the machine, and set up the 80MB drive as Primary Master and the 500MB as Primary Slave, you should be set.

If you still can't boot from those smaller drives, replace them, then SYS the 500MB drive at a Win98 command prompt-- and then copy over the IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS from the 80MB drive to replace those those files.

Then, assuming the 500MB drive is R: and the 80MB drive is Q:, open a command window, change to the R: drive and issue the command: xcopy /s /e /v q:\*.* . You can also create a directory on your main drive (like C:\DOSSTUFF), open a command window, change to C:\DOSSTUFF and issue the same command.

You could also put both those drives into the 486, boot from the 80MB, sys the 500MB, and use XCOPY again.

The 486 is proprietary - Compaq - and it will not recognize the 80 MB drive. It won't even boot with it. It starts to boot, then promptly quits. No problem with the 500 MB though.


I'll try your other suggestions and post back.

The 80 MB drive is weak with bad sectors so I wanted to retreive the files and put them onto a better functioning drive. I had also posted this on the Win98 BB Forum and got a response there to download and run "XXCOPY" which actually did the trick! I ran it from the 80 MB onto a temporary file on my 20 GB drive using Win98 then physically changed the drive and again XXCOPY this time from the directory on my 20 GB drive onto the 500 MB drive and it worked famously! I made the 500 MB drive the primary master and it booted - the files totally retrievable! Awesome! We're in business!

Thanks for taking the time to respond to my call for assistance - much appreciated!

Check this out... http://www.xxcopy.com/

Glad it worked, but why did you download XXCOPY when XCOPY comes with DOS and Win98? It would have worked just as well -- it's not like you'd have to worry about long file names.

I think it was just because it was something new to me. Although I've never had a problem with DOS, I was looking for more. I went to the web site and read about the features and wanted to try it. It worked well. As I watched it progress through the file copying process, I could see that in this application it worked basically the same as XCOPY. If you haven't yet, you should check out the site.

Thanks again!

hey nick!
i'm from sask too and even though it's an old post try this even with newer os's.
google ranish
google dos navigator
download em
use em
they are legal
they are free
they fit on a bootable floppy
they even work in full 32 bit
navigator is windowed with its own cd player etc
ranish is 100 dollars cheaper than partition magic

enjoy!!!