Changing the boot drive question

[Jonty]

When you change a hard drive to make it bootable exactly what files are transferred over to the new disc? I know the SYS command is used to do this but does this just move the system boot files over or are there other files that get moved?

The reason I'm asking is that I want to make my new drive the boot drive and I want to use the older drive just for archiving stuff. If the only files that get moved are the system boot files do I then have to move over manually the Windows folder etc so that the new drive then does the majority of the work?

Basically I want the new faster drive to be the boot drive and let it do all the work while the older drive takes it easy and just stores stuff.

What would be the best way to do this?

Thanks for your help on this one!

[howste]

It's actually pretty tricky trying to manually move the Windows OS from one drive to another. If I understand what you're doing, you have a new hard drive that you want to load the OS on and use the old one for storage, right? I usually use DriveCopy from Powerquest to do this. It duplicates all the information from the original HD onto the new one. You can then do whatever you want with the original drive.

Steve

[Jonty]

Thanks for your answer Steve, using something like Drivecopy seems the best bet. It would certainly save a lot of time.

[spark25]

Look into norton *Ghost*. Great program for disk,partition copy.

[NDC]

Yeah, Norton Ghost works great for me, I have Windows 98Se on one of my systems. I have the complete windows 98 and applications all backed up on a mobile rack hard drive using ghost. Whenver the Windows starts acting up, I just pop in the mobile rack and restore the backed up windows 98 and Applications. It takes about 15 minutes. I haven't had ANY problems with it yet. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif