Shenan Stanley said:
First - Carey is right (and wrong).. It depends on your situation and
skill level/available toolset.
You can (in generic terms) make a disk image of one Windows XP PC and
apply it to another in many cases - for example - using sysprep properly
or if the machine match in hardware close enough. You cannot make an
image of a Pentium II system and apply that image (without modification by
anything) to a Pentium IV system with different chipset/video/etc and
*expect* it to work without performing a repair installation at the very
least.
In this case - we are talking making an image of Windows 98 - not XP - and
thus - you have none of these problems. Make your image and put it on
whatever - Windows 98 will attempt to load the correct drivers needed on
the first dozen or so boots it will take (depending on differences.)
To me - it sounds like Sue is attempting to do something that Sue may not
understand enough of to actually accomplish. She wants to make a machine
a dual boot system off of images.. not fresh installs - etc. One would
naturally assume then that Sue knows how to use Ghost to make an IMAGE of
a hard disk drive to file(s) on a network location or external drive so
that the image could then be applied to another partition elsewhere - but
instead of assuming - we have to wait on Sue to volunteer more information
about..
What she has currently..
What she wants to have..
What she knows to do and what she is doing..
Shenan:
We are really making this more complicated than it needs to be. As I
understand it, Sue has two machines. On the "old" one she has a Windows 98
operating system, presumably single-partitioned. On the "new" one, which she
wants to multi-boot with XP & Win98, she has Windows XP presently installed
and a second partition that either contains a Windows 98 OS or was created
to hold that operating system. In either case it doesn't really matter in
this situation.
Sue also has a USB or Firewire external hard drive on which she attempted to
clone the contents of her "old" drive containing the Win98 OS using Ghost
2003. In this she was apparently unsuccessful for reasons that she doesn't
explain. I assume her objective was to re:clone the cloned contents of that
USB/Firewire EHD to the partition on the "new" machine designated to hold
the Win98 OS. Exactly why she's taking this route (assuming I correctly
understand her) is not clear, although it *is* viable.
Using Ghost 2003, she *can* clone the contents of her "old" machine, the one
with the Win98 OS, to her external HD and she *can* then re:clone the
contents of that drive to the Win98 (or empty) partition on the "new"
machine. Ghost 2003 has this capability.
Another approach, and the one I would generally use, is to remove the "old"
drive, install it in the "new" one and make the disk-to-disk (partition)
clone that way.
So now her "new" machine has two partitions, the C: partition containing her
XP OS, and the D: partition containing the Win98 OS. We know the XP one is
bootable. But it may be necessary to install this or that driver for the
Win98 OS so that that OS will be ultimately bootable.
And now we come to the multi-boot scenario. Under these circumstances it
probably would be best for her to use a third-party boot manager such as
Boot Magic (included with Partition Magic). Offhand, the only other way I
can think of to create a multi-boot capability in this situation would be a
reinstall of XP. I *think* that would work, but I'm not entirely sure. I
can't recall the results the last time I attempted it.
Anna
