booting

[G-String MIX]

I got a new hard disk. I gave it the same number of partitions and copied all of the files from the old hard drive to the new one. I boot it up and windows 98 boots up. (Now you might be asking what's wrong with this, I�m getting to it) I have windows XP and Windows 98 installed and I cant boot XP. (There is no OS choose menu)

Normally I would just fresh install 98 and then XP however since M$ is dumb I wouldn�t be able to activate it.

I'm not really sure how booting works, I always assumed that the computer looks for the autoexe and runs that. I looked at the drive and the data is identical. The jumper settings (slave and master) are all set up correctly. When I put my old disk in I can choose OS's however I can't with the new one.

Thanks in advance.

[GODJonez]

The boot sector is not any file. So when you copy all the files, you don't copy the boot section. If you partitioned the drive with Fdisk, it made the boot win98-style, not xp-style. Try using Xp's recovery install, it should recreate the boot sector.

[Roux!]

And how did you copy them, exactly...? There's quite a few applications out there which "clone" an HD, partitions and all...

[G-String MIX]

I used this amazing Maxtor bootable cd ROM. It dosn't clone the hardrive it just said that it would copie all of the files from one partision to the other. There didn't seem to be any "Cloning" tools. I just assumed that, What i know now as the boot sector that if i copied all of the files that would get copied as well.

From the sounds of it I don't think that the cloning thing would work for me because i want 3 equaly sized partisions that take up the whole drive. The new HD is 2x bigger so...

i have confidense that the winxp disk will fix it up. Not sure how to use it though. I should be able to figur it out.

[G-String MIX]

I ran into another problem. I Got OS choice menu to come up using the win XP repair utility on the win xp disk. And I can run windows xp happily. However now I can't set up windows 98. I can make a windows 98 choose but i can't get it to work.

When I try to set it up it asks to select an operating system to set up
It only detects my win xp OS
So I choose that and it says

Enter the load identifier: (witch I found out to be the name displayed)

Then

Enter OS load options: (which I have no idea what this is)

I tried things like "C:\" "C:\windows"
My win 98 installation is on the C drive.

Please help me

[G-String MIX]

I might as well finish this off. What I ended up doing was putting the files back on the new HD so windows 98 would boot. From there i pretended to install windows xp. when I got the os choice menu i ran win 98 and deleted the windows xp setup files off of C: then manually changed the "Windows XP SETUP" settings to "Windows XP" settings in the BOOT.cfg file. AND BAM!!!