[wplug] Swapping OS Drives

[Vanco, Donald]

TC Linux wrote:
> Hello there Pluggers!
> 
> I'm to the point now where I want to swap which hard drive which OS is
> on.  Currently my faster, larger drive has WinME on it and the slower,
> smaller hand-me-down has Red Hat 9.  Faster drive at the moment is the
> 'master' and the slower drive is the 'slave'.
> 
> I want to keep my dual boot situation for a while, but I want to
> reformat things so that Red Hat gets the faster, bigger drive.
> 
> The question I have is this:
> 
> Does WindowsME have any issues with being installed on a "slave" drive
> which I believe would make it the second disk as far as the bios is
> concerned? 
	WindozeME can barely tolerate being run on the primary drive, much
less the secondary.  From my experiences, there are far too many references
to "C:\" in the registry to try and move the drive - you might be better
served by "flopping" the drives with the bootloader (something like
ide0=0x80 or something like that - see your bootloader docs for details)

> I can probably just swap the roles of the drives but if I can get by
> without doing all that I'd be much happier.
	My question is - with the capabilities of the bootloader (be it LILO
or GRUB) what's the point of physically swaping the drives???????  
	If you're talking about clearing the OS off drive 1 and moving it to
drive 2 (and vice-versa) there's not going to be an easy way to do it
without a 3rd drive that's larger than any others, GHOST (or similar), or
simply reloading.  If your installation of WinME is more than a year old
you'd be doing yourself a favor reloading it anyway - it's likely as bloated
and abused as a <insert witty but PI euphemism here>.
	...and if it comes time to reload - get off ME altogether, unless,
of course, you have an app that requires it and will not function under the
"compatibility mode" of XP (I have one such app - http://www.mixman.com/)

You can back up your DOS drive like this:
(you'll need to be in Linux if that's not clear)

CLEAN AND DEFRAG YOUR ME DRIVE FIRST!

dd if=/dev/hdc bs=32k | gzip -9c > /some_dir/my_WinME.gz (here /dev/hdc =
you WinME - alter for your ME install device)

A restore would be like:
cat /some_dir/my_WinME.gz | gzip -d -c | dd of=/dev/hdc bs=32k" (where
/dev/hdc represents the new drive you want the ME image on)

	Note that the above example will have partitioning exactly as your
original drive did - you'll need some tool to expand the partition


You can also chop this backup into chunks to burn to CD(-R) - sometimes this
can help when there's no chance of getting a 3rd IDE device:

dd if=/dev/hdc bs=32k | gzip -9c | split -b 650m - /some_dir/my_WinME_
	again altering device ID and not that the split size of 650m -
650MB.  If you have larger CD's/CD-R's you can up this to 700.  This will
generate a series of files name my_WinME_a, my_WinME_b, etc - but note that
you'll still need sufficient free space on the target drive to store all the
images!  If your WinME drive is 10GB you need 10GB free!  In your case - not
good news.....
	If you're slick, and fast with a burner you can burn and delete
portions as they arrive keeping required free space to a minimum....

restore:
cat /some_dir/my_WinME* | gzip -dc | dd of=/dev/hdc obs=32k

	Final note - this kind of backup / restore can take a LONG time....

HTH
Don