Win95 Migration -- The Aftermath
Well, it's done. My customer's Win95 system with 240MB available is now a Win98 system with 5.8 GB available.
But I was fought every ... step ... of ... the ... way.
The upgrade to Win98 went very smoothly. So did the conversion to Fat32.
I had two drives: An 10g IBM Deskstar and a 6.4g Seagate. Of course, I went for the big drive.
My first mistake. The BIOS couldn't recognize the full size, only 8 gigs. (I had tried to find an update to the BIOS some weeks earlier and I did find one, but there was no mention of large drive update.)
Anyway, I figured I could make the drive work with an overlay. So I used Disk Copy 2.0 to duplicate the contents from the old drive to the new.
It worked, but the resulting partition was the exact same size as the original drive and Partition Magic couldn't see the rest of the drive.
Why? EZBios. And this was my fault, honestly. I had installed a Maxtor drive some time ago and used MaxBlast to install it ... which brought over EZ-Bios.
So, how do I take off EZ-Bios? Easy. Load MaxBlast and disable it right?
No.
First, when booted with the floppy/cd combo, it loaded a mouse driver that failed to detect the old Logitech. The driver would just hang.
Booting only from floppy brought up MaxBlast, only to have it tell me there weren't any Maxtor drives in the system and, well, it had to close. (This Maxtor drive is not in this system anymore. It was a one-time thing.
So, a quick search on Google tells me that DriveGuide from IBM can help. This leads to a Chinese site that happens to archive the software, which is no longer available from IBM's site (so I read, anyway).
I load it and disable EZ-Bios.
The new drive won't boot. Uh oh.
I re-enable EZ-Bios. The drive boots.
So, how can I fix this? Disable EZ-Bios then Fdisk /MBR, right?
No.
At this point I decided to cut my losses. Maybe I could have un-installed EZ-Bios, then FDISK /MBR, but I don't know.
I pulled the 10g out and watched the IDE cable literally disintegrate in my hands. Pop. Pop. The connectors fall off the cable.
Quick run to the basement for another IDE cable.
Next problem: The label on the 6.4g is worn away. The jumper guide is unreadable. I Google the drive model number and can't find it. On a hunch, I change one number on the model and find a model and follow its guidelines to make it a slave. (The old HD is still a master at this point.) This works. The BIOS detects the drive properly in both size and IDE position.
I load up DriveGuide again and, this time, disable EZ-BIOS on the OLD HDD. I confirm the old HDD still boots. I re-copy the data from the old drive to the 6.4g. No problems.
Until I try to make the new HDD a master. The jumper guide I found is incorrect. Or it seems. I take turns trying each position. No dice. The drive can be detected as a slave or not at all.
I do more Googling and, finally, find a page on Dell's site that mentions nearly every hard drive they've ever installed in any system. My drive is on there. I click the link to the install page, expecting a 404, and found a jumper guide.
Except it confirms the other guide!
Oh no. Now what? Well, there is a note at the bottom of this guide regarding master-detect problems if the slave is not an "ATA" device.
At this point, my new HDD is attempting to be a master. A Lite-ON CDRW is the slave. Well, it is ATAPI, but not ATA. So, I try the two-jumper configuration the Dell page and, voila, it works.
Furthermore it boots and what was a 240mb free space drive is not a cool 6000gb free.
:sad:
Of course, I didn't mention how in order to take out the older drive, I had to take out EVERY ISA and PCI card in order to unscrew the motherboard tray and pull that out so I could get to two frikkin screws holding the drive in its bay.
Dear god.
Yeah, I know, I made a few mistakes here. But I learned a heck of a lot.
m
