The title pretty well summarizes the challenge. I am installing Windows XP Pro on a system currently running Windows 95, largely to expand the disk space from 4-drives at 8-gigs each to 4-drives at
70-gig each.
The problem is that everything worth saving is stored on the 8-gig system drive, along with the Windows 95 operating system. How can I save my precious programs and data, some of which is 15 years old, while expanding disk capacity to the full capacity of the drives.
Initial experiments reveal that you cannot copy files from an FAT 16 drive to a Fat 32 drive, since the operating system appears to recognize only one FAT size at a time. The solution that I am considering is to copy each of my files to a CD, then reload them on the new system and attempt to integrate them with the new Windows XP operating systems, still there must be an easier way.
Transfer of the data is easy, but a clean transfer of the programs themselves is not easy, because in many cases I don't have the original installation disks.
You have 15-year old data still spinning around on a hard drive? WITHOUT SECONDARY STORAGE/ BACKUP? The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as I read that!
Write yourself some CDR disks of your data before you go to sleep tonight!!!
WHY do you not have the original installation disks? HOW do you know that any of those programs (and specifically those versions) will RUN on XP? May be time to buy upgraded versions of the software(s). Surely you still have the serial numbers, codes, etc. Otherwise, you're likely screwed.
First, I'd recommend buring your data to CD either way. Next, the program Partition Magic will convert your drive from FAT16 to FAT32, without data loss. I've had good luck doing this, but I wouldnt attempt it without a data backup.
If you dont want to spend the $70, I'd recommed transfering using CDs. There are all sorts of programs designed to help back up drives to CD, but I dont have much experience with them.
You might have some luck booting into DOS and copying files, but I'm not sure. Beyond that, you could put the drive into a strictly FAT16 machine and connecting the two via ethernet. But I'm guessing you dont have a FAT16 machine handy.
The easiest way is probably going to be the networking route then copy it across to a new machine. It's old software that won't require registry, but you may have to play for a while copying files till you've picked up any strays required in %windows/system. The new PC may just be another W95 since, as mentioned, you won't know if the software will work with anything later. Ah, versionitis.......
Check that the PC BIOS and the IDE controller can handle 70gb drives. Is it possible that the reason you're using 8gb drives now is that the PC motherboard doesn't support larger drives?
There's a long and involved procedure that can get around using one of the commercial tools, such as Partition Magic, but I would suggest using the tool.
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I think this is bar-room BS. I've had multiple OS and data partitions and NT and later OS's read 'em all. I can move data from one partition to the other. I'm pretty sure at one time I still had a FAT16 partition, too. Yup. Still do. It's out the door soon, too.
2k and XP installs give you the option of moving apps.
If you don't want to risk conversion install XP or 2000 on the new drive and copy from the old drive to the new drive.
Original win95 cannot see FAT32 but newer OS can see FAT16 and copy it to its FAT32 or NTFS.
So just install the 2 drives or to be REALY SAFE install only the new drive and put the OS on it. Then, once finished put the old one back in as a slave and copy it over.
Of course, as mentioned the only programs that this will work for are the ones that don't install a whole crap load of components and registry entries all over the system.
Besides, if the programs did add a bunch of components and registry entries they probably aren't very XP friendly anyway. Though the really old 15+ apps are hopefully single EXE files that will work....
Also, 8gig on a FAT16 system? no way, you must have it broken into diff partitions, correct?!?
Actually FAT16 is limited to 2GB partitions. The BIOS limit can be overcome most of the time by disk overlays that almost all large drives I know of ship with. Also, if the PC is really old, like this one sounds like, you will need to use the cylinder limit jumper on the new drive (if it has one).
I didn't mean to imply such a nightmare scenario. All of my data and programs are periodically backed up to a duplicate system disk that is only concurrently on line for that one purpose. Less frequent backups go to CDRs that are kept in a different physical location.
"Compzilla" itself has four hard-drives, two of which are backups. Up to now, two of the hard-drives were devoted to my Win95 working operations, and the other two to trial installations of Linux and Windows98, but as of last night are now running Windows XP Pro.
Because many of these were disributed on old 5" floppies and the original media became useless more than 10 years ago. Others were intended to be installed under Windows 3.0, and others consist entirely of .exe, .bat, and library files many of which have been repeatedly patched over the years. Some need an emulator to even run. In general, we're talking about software that traces back 15 years or more, much of which was originally distributed as bits, pieces, and patches without exageration many hundreds of 360K floppies! The original distribution media on things like the X-Windows system and much of my embedded firmware tools is on 9-track, 1/2" computer tape. Years back a dial-up VAX system read these tapes, and download the files to me over a 1200-baud phone line (which sometimes took days of time to complete). Today, even the VAX is nearing total extinction.
Fortunately, I do have original distribution disks for the more later software, but this is mostly run of the mill commercial stuff like Pagemaker, Microsoft Office, Autocad, Hummingbird, etc. This should be no problem.
I don't, and this is why I've clung to Win95 so long. I'm expecting that pretty much all of the DOS executables will run under XP just as they did under the windows shell of Win95. I am worried about the emulation software that I employ to simulate program execution on completely different platforms. If it can't be made to run in the XP environment, then I'll simply have to keep the Win95 platform running for another 10 years or so, until the fielded equipment that I support becomes extinct.
Most of the specialized products for developing embedded code for specific platforms are no longer available, and in some cased the newer versions of the software are either incompatable with the original source code, or produce different executables than do the originals. Franklin's 8051 development suite is an example of this...the code produced by it Windows version is different from that produced by its DOS version. Even Microsofts newer releases of their C and C++ software, is incompatible with the source code written for its earlier releases.
Surely not, since most of the older sofware didn't use them. A few did, but they are not at the center of the problem.
Except for the increase in disk space FAT32 provides, the newer releases of Windows, including XP Pro, don't really provide me with any new capabilities of significance, so if the port of my software and data to FAT32/Windows XP is too much of a hassle, I'll simply continue using Win95 and keep XP as an alternative system along with Linux.
Windows XP (any version) can recognize any file system organization on any drive on a drive-by-drive basis. There's absolutely no problem connecting two drives, one FAT16 and one FAT32 at the same time and doing the copy directly.
Sincere thanks for that bit of info Norm. This wouldn't work under Win98 configured for FAT32, but I haven't yet tried it since getting XP running only late last night. I remain a bit concerned about XP deciding the leave some thumbprint on what is the Win95 system disk, but will trying it using the Win95 back-up drive which I can regenerate if it becomes corrupted.
Now, can someone tell me how to shell out to DOS from XP, and what happened to Windows Explorer? As you can tell, I'm just beginning to find my way around on XP. (I need DOS support for roughly half of my legacy application, including Microsoft Fortran, MASM, GWBASIC, 8086 and 8051 tools, etc., so getting these loaded and running will be my first priority.
Now if I can only find where to tell it my monitor model, and the screen resolution and display characteristics I want to use, ... an a hundred and one hardware related setup things, I should be ready to start actually start porting some of my aps and data files.
The Windows-E shortcut still brings up Explorer in XP, and using Start/Run and running 'cmd' will bring up a DOS shell. It's not true DOS though, so don't expect backward computability!
Yes,each of my hard-drives is divided into 4 partitiions, so when activated by the CMOS menu, brings on line the equivalent of C:, D:, E:, and F: logical disks.
If you need more space you can upgrade to Windows 95B or C version (which support FAT32), as well as Windows 98 or 98 Second Edition. If you can get an intermediate drive, you can copy from FAT16 system drive to new drive with Northon Ghost and convert partitions with Partition Magic. If you release some space (in the space occupied with partitions other than C:) you can install XP "over" 9x system (create new partition, but not C:, format NTFS), and than chose XP or 9x system through start-up menu. If you boot XP, you will be able to see all partitions, but if you would like to see NTFS parttion of XP system you should use aditional programs, not included in standard Windows installations. Or you can format XP partition as FAT32, and upgrade Windows 95 to 95B/95C/98/98SE, and see all partitions from whatever system you boot.
Thanks for this Mike, but let me ask you a couple of honest, no guile questions. When I formatted the disk-drive targeted to XP, I specified all FAT32 partitions. Was this a mistake, now that I can still go back and correct my error. Perhaps a naive question, but what advantages would I gain were I to format in NTFS vs. FAT32?
With regard to Partition Magic, I tend to shy away. Back 3 years ago working on an FAA project, someone had partitioned a disk using Partition Magic. I'm no expert on the subject, but it appeared to me that this product works through some sort of emulation that required it make modification of the boot sector of system disks. Partition Magic gave us some problem that I don't recall, but getting it off the disk took about three days of effort, that may or may not have required even the today draconic step of low-level formatting of the hard-drive -- something that the manufacturers of these hard drives definitely don't approve of.
Having just completed the installation of Windows XP Pro, I took carefuly note that in its listing of disks it listed disk drived that were set "off line" or "none" by the BIOS of my computer. This capability of XP has not yet created a problem, but has taught me that I can no longer trust my CMOS settings to determine what is, and what is not, accessible to a piece of software. As a result, I just ordered a removable hard-disk host, with two removable drive cartridges. I found the fact that XP is capable of going around the CMOS settings to access a drive pretty frightening.
Frankly, I had expected the task that I had initally targeted to be a piece-of-cake buty it is turning out to be rather complicated and problematic. I was perfectly content with Windows 95 as an operating system, and simply wanted to invoke the disk space expansion that FAT32 provided vs. FAT16, and had even believed that there was a Microsoft Service Pack available that would do this, and only this. Still, I couldn't locate it.
Last night came the straw that nearly broke the camel's back. I had just intalled AT&T Worldnet package on the Win XP system, and gone online to test it in preparation to registering Win XP with Microsoft. (Obviously I have a valid authorizion code else I wouldn't have progressed this far.) Worldnet installed quite easily, but while I was testing it on the Web a message from above that identified itself only as (sic) "NT Authority" was shutting down my system, and then proceeded to do so. Obviously this originated from Microsoft. My reaction was that Microsoft could do something like this at this time,then they could do so at any time to any XP user.
Maybe I'm strange, but I really don't do well with control things like this, so I may well abandon Microsoft XP Pro, and simply revert back to Windows 95 while continuing to look for a way to expand my availble disk space from that available under FAT16 to that of FAT32 (which is all I wanted to do in the first place). I'm quite sure that if I search around sufficiently I can find someone willing to sell be a service pack that makes this possible, otherwise I'll simply have to install multiple 8-GB disk-drives.
NTFS is advocated by some of my friends as the most robust file system. I am not sure about that, but I am sure that I do not have enough utilities or knowladge to recover NTFS file system errors. I have seen not any, but those things come here and there. As for FAT32, there are problems (like cluster waste in larger partitions), but I have managed to recover system partition that was messed up by installation scripts of UnixWare system. I am experimenting with XP and NTFS, but not on my machine! So at the moment I am not sure what to recomend to you...
I think Partition Magic ver. 7 is safe and good and yes I had some problems with ver.4, so nothing is safe without backup!
As I suggested in previous post, you could upgrade to Windows 95 version B or C and have FAT32 partitions. Those are OEM release of Windows (OSR2; 2.1; 2.5) so if you prefer legal versions you should go for Windows 98, or better jet Windows 98 Second Edition, which is my favorit.
I have not experienced such things. On installations that I administer, a company key was applied (OSL agreement) , and ServicePack 1a added. So far all installations work fine, the only thing that is bad is speed on some Celeron 400 based PC. Yes, and as with all newer variants more memory is a must!
Service Packs ware introduced with Windows 2000 and newer, I think. Other than previously described upgrades, I am not sure there are other options. As for HDDs, it might be a problem to find those disks, and if you can find tham new, cost per MB might be to high!
NTFS Advantage: more efficient use of HDD space Disadvantage: can't be accesssed by DOS-based OSes (no booting from floppy); requires HDD with functional NT installation. Workaround: CD-bootable version of Linux ("Live CD" e.g. Knoppix); Linux understands most filesystems.
If you can stand the added bloat (I'm guessing you can),
98SE sounds like the way to go: readily available, widely documented, understands FAT32 & USB,
3000 bugs removed (accordimng to M$) since 1st version of W95 (6000 bugs according to Dvorak).
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