Friggin' PCs

[JaXanim]

As readers of my life story will know, I'm not very PC-literate. In fact if it wasn't for the generosity of fellow A_Orger, sprirantho (All Hail), I'd still be stuggling with a cheap, but not very cheerful, Packard Hell with a dicky power pack. As it is, I'm sufin' with a 400MHz PII! Cool eh?

Or at least it was until the thing kept telling me that 'Drive C is Full'. Drive C was a massive 850Mb Maxtor which came with the original Hell Box (At least Maxtors are good drives!) Anyway, I decided to swap it for a 20Gb Fujitsu I got from eBay. I'd downloaded all the guff on copying/cloning drives using a simple DOS command. It all looked real easy - or so I thought.

I think the problem was I had a nice 80Gb drive attached as Drive D. I did this so all the non-OS stuff would be separate, like on an Amiga. It was a logical thing to do, haveing cut my teeth on Amigas. So, I removed Drive D and replaced it with the Fujitsu - the instructions said to make the new drive as Drive D to do the copying. So I booted it up, told the CMOS thingy that I'd swapped the slave drives and prepared to clone the boot drive.

There was some disk activity before it finally showed that my Internet Browser Cache had been copied to the new drive and as far as the system was concerned, this was a total screw-up. After that, it wouldn't boot at all. Various important OS files were said to be corrupted or missing from Drive C. Bad, real bad!

I tried my best, booting with the Win98 Emergency Boot Disk and the Scandisk tool. This seemed to be doing a good job refixing Drive C (took several hours) until it said it had exceeded the 256 maximum allocation of renamed/fixed files/directories and stopped working.
What a load of c--p!

So, out with the old and back in with the new. It's been a complete refit from bottom up. New Fuji as boot drive and out with the Win98 CD Installer. How the Hell do you swap boot drives without going through this bloody trauma?

Should I have just left everything as it was and added the new drive on Channel 2 as a slave to the CD-ROM and just copied the boot drive to it?

Friggin', oh friggin' PCs!

JaX

[whabang]

COpying the OS from one disk to another is generally problematic unless you use NOrton GHost or a similar application.

BEtter to reinstall.


IF you have to do a copy, un-hide all hidden files on the original drive. MAny of the vital system files in WIndows 98 are hidden, and will not be copied if you don't remove the hidden-atribute.

ANd by the way, cleaning the browser cache prior to a copy will make things go faster.

[JaXanim]

The prescribed DOS copying routine would've seen the hidden files, that wasn't the problem. Should I have left Drive D as it was and placed my new drive lower down the chain, before copying Drive C?

Cheers,

JaX

[minator]

Friggin', oh friggin' PCs!

Don't blame PCs for this...

I could copy a BeOS boot partition, run "bootman" to add it to the boot menu and it'd boot first time no problem.

I could then take out the disc, put it into a completely different machine and it'd boot no problem.


This is a *Microsoft* problem, not a PC one!

[nilix]

I know this is an old tread but it sounds like you have to many files in the root of C:\ if you do even if you have an 120gig drive it can say it's full and can't write anymore information to the drive.

usally scandisk as it finds corruption will place the pieces of files it finds in C:\ very common problem with win9x just remove the files with the same names should be hundreds of them in c:\

c:\move *.chk c:\temp

will move all the scandisk recovered files to temp so you can look at it later. you should find you have space again...

[bloodline]

What the hell!! :-o

Just use something like Partition Magic 8.0 :roll:

[nex4060]

If you do a copy from dos it will/might not create the long file names correctly! You can easyly copy the disk with norton ghost.

[JaXanim]

@All

Many thanks for your suggestions. I haven't returned to this thread cos I decided to swap the drive and start from scratch. Drastic, but I don't understand PCs (er, I mean Microsoft's logic) well enough to persist with the recovery.

I removed the old drive, fitted a bigger one and reinstalled Win98SE. Of course, I lost all my emails, etc, etc, but at least it's going again.

Tsck...

JaX

[Plaz]

Just wanted to add my indorsement of partition magic. Power Quest tools rock when it comes to dealing with PC partitions. Normally when using a util to install a new drive(and I've done it hundreds of times), old c: is set to slave and the new drive goes in as master. Your util might be different, but just make sure the drive layout and instructions are clear before attempting. It's too easy to copy the new blank drive over the old data if you get it wrong.
And if frickin' PCs have got you down, you might checkout this new band I really enjoy.... http:\\www.frickina.com :-)

Plaz