Jim Phillips wrote:
> The 850MB drive on my Win95 PC is getting full, so I sprung for a
> 2GB drive and installed it over the weekend.  I got a copy of
> PowerQuest's DriveCopy (which is supposed to be "the easiest
> way to copy your old drive to your new drive").  However, it
> doesn't work; that is, after installing the new drive and
> using DriveCopy to copy the contents of the old drive, the PC
> refuses to boot.  Reviewing the BOOTLOG.TXT file shows that
> the PC is hanging in the kernel init (last message "Initializing
> KERNEL").  PowerQuest's tech support has been less than helpful.
>
> Okay, no big deal says I, I have a tape drive.  So, I backed up
> the old drive, reformatted the new drive, and restored the tape
> to the new drive.  However, now when I boot, I get a fatal VFAT
> error (something about VFAT is corrupt and can't be loaded).

Is this a WIN95 machine?  If so, I had this problem a couple of years ago on
a much too regular basis.  After discussing the options with MS, the only
one they could provide was to reformat the drive and reinstall the OS.  The
first time it took 3 days to reinstall the OS and then all the software.
The second time it took 1 1/2 days, and by the third time I had it down to
*only* 1/2 day.  I never had it occur after the third event because I
immediately installed NT.  (BTW, I didn't have a tape drive, so I couldn't
just restore the user programs and data.  I have to reinstall the user
programs and then restore the data from disk).

MS never could tell me what was wrong, other than my VFAT directory was
corrupted.  ("Gee, that sounds just like the message I read", I responded)

> Has anyone got any ideas on how to install a new drive in a
> PC?  Right now, I have the machine running on the old drive
> with the new drive as the slave, but I'd like to replace the
> old drive with the new drive.  And I don't want to have to
> re-install every piece of software I have.  I'd like to
> copy the old drive to the new drive either using a utility
> or with the tape drive.

Is there a reason you want to remove the old drive?  When I added my "new
drive" 1 1/2 years ago, I first thought about doing what you wanted to do.
Then I decided that it would be much easier to set up a slave and have two
drives.  Not only was it faster, I also got to keep my old 1.2gb drive.

> <begin rant>
>
> You know, this is one of the many reasons I hate PC's.  When we
> added a new drive to our HP3K 918, it was no big deal.  Just
> slip the drive in, add it to the config, and go.  We did a
> complete reload because we wanted to spread the files around,
> but that was an optional step, and we could have used a third
> party utility to spread the files around.

Ah, but you can boot off the tape drive on the 3k.  Can you do that with
W95?  Adding a new drive (not replacing the "system volume set") is easy on
both systems (you've done that on the PC with the master/slave
installation-just like the 918).  Replacing a drive that is not part of the
"SVS" is easy on both also.  The problem comes in when you are replacing the
drive(s) on the "SVS".

Just like on the 3k, you have to back up the user data to tape.  If on the
3k, you can add the OS to the tape and "boot" from there.  On the PC, you
have the CD to boot from.  In both cases, you have to reinstall the OS
first, then the user data.

> I keep asking myself, what would I have done if the old drive
> would have crashed?

(See previous paragraph :)

Kidding aside, I hope this helps.  I've found that if I think of the PC as a
3k (okay, a stretch since there's no real support), it seems to help.  In
fact, I found installing a new supported drive much easier on the PC than on
the 3k because I didn't need to configure it.

Does this mean I like the PC better?  HA!  I do like doing Word, Excel,
Outlook, Reflection and printing on the PC, and I like doing real
database-application work on the 3k.

LB