hard drives

There are several different answers to your question depending on how complicated the situation. Give more information about the specifics if these answers don't take care of it.
1a) If drives are in the same machine or same network using win95/98/ME/NT/2k drag and drop info from folder on drive one to drive two folder.
1b) Use OS install disk or CD to install operating system to new drive.
I suspect this is not what your looking for. If you give more details on what you want to do, I can give you more detailed instructions.
What I think you are actually getting at is you have a new (bigger) hard drive and want to install all of your current drive information to the new one. If this is the case then you may want to "Clone" your old drive to a new one. If you know how to replace one hard drive with another and understand the Master, Slave relationship there are 2 products that could do this job for you. "Drive Copy" by Power Quest and "Ghost" by Norton. Each should be available atyou local computer store and come with complete instructions. "Drive Copy" is probably best for stand alone computers or upgrades. "Ghost" my be better for Networking and more complicated solutions.

Try a product by symantec called Ghost. It allows for hd cloaning.

There are so many ways to do it, Using 3rd party software. Ghost by symantic, if there is a OS on there you could use the network, FTP, and other ways. or you could slave the drive and copy what you want and then take it out and set as master in thenew computer or where ever it is going. Most OS come with installation instructions and are pretty much pain free to install if you followthe directions. Once again there are many ways to do this from easy to hard.

I have used Ghost, DriveImage, and a few others and they all work very well, but you may not have to purchase them. When you purchase your new HD, it's setup software may be able to move your data for you! About a year ago I upgraded to a WD 4gig drive (it was cheap) and when I loaded the setup/partitioning disk it came with, it offered the option to copy/clone/image/transfer the data from my old drive! It worked very well. Just something to think about....

All these posts are very good. There is one alternative. Only one caveat here.... Compaq Non-dos utility partitions will not copy using XCOPY ! There are some very good tips about Win 95/98 on the Bob Cerelli site that can be helpful. Go to www.onecomputerguy.com and choose the Installation Info button. Lots of help here... and you don't have to purchase software. Good Luck, bruce

You need to copy your essential files to a floppy. I am assuming you don't have a large database saved on your local drive.Floppys only handle 1.44MB of space. You can check the size of your files in windows explorer.

If you are on a network and have shared files you can copy them to that file.Space probably won't be a problem.

As far as installing a new system you must use a system disk and format it. this is done with a floppy. If you are installing windows 95 you need a backpack (portable CD Rom that plugs in to parallel port.)
You need to set the sectors heads and tracks in BIOS.It may be automatic but be prepared to do so.
98 will allow you Cdrom support.Then you need to use DOS. Any office superstore or small PC company would probably do it for you for a fee. If you don't understand this it would be the easiest and most time efficient way to go.
It should not take them more that 1 hour to do this work

To answer your first question...
Most systems allow you to connect up to four ide devices. Install the new hard drive as a primary slave, or secondary master, or secondary slave. You then boot up the system. Go into BIOS and set the drive type tobe configured automatically. If you can't do this you'll need to specify the information manually. Save and exit from BIOS. You will then boot the system into your OS (which is on the hard drive that is set up as the Primary Master). I'm going to assume you are using Windows, so go into your explorer and move or copy the data you need.

Second question...
The MOST IMPORTANT thing to do is read the documentation that came with the hard drive first. The second MOST IMPORTANT action to take is to create a system disk that has support for your CD-ROM. After you create that, you install the hard drive as the Primary Master. Put your system disk in the floppy drive. Boot the system up. You will boot to the floppy drive. Run the program FDISK (this will erase anything you may have had on this drive, so if you have some data you want to keep, hopefully you've transfered that data). From FDISK you need to delete any existing partitions. Then create a Primary partition. Exit Fdisk. Run theprogram FORMAT as, FORMAT C: /S. This will format the drive so you'll be able to install an OS. You need to reboot after this. Boot the system to your floppy drive again, put the OS installation CD in the CD-ROM and run SETUP.

If your hard drive is too big for your system you may need to install software onto the drive before the FORMAT or FDISK step. This should come with the hard drive. After reading the hard drive documentation you'll have a better idea.

Hopefully, this will save you from having to buy anything except a floppy disk. Good Luck!

You can try Magic Mover which is included with partition magic. It will copy all files you specify along with all the proper DLL files that will be needed to work properly.

Without knowing what OS you have, you should be able to copy or clone the drive using the GUI. Install the 2nd or new hdd in the system, either as slave or master on 2nd bus, fdisk and format the drive with the existing op sys. Boot to the GUI, make sure show all files is selected under the view options, then select all files on the old hdd, and copy them to the new hdd using the right click paste routine. When you put the new hdd in the boot position, you may have to go back into fdisk (using a boot floppy) and mark the partion active so that it will be bootable. Vary rarely I have had to sys the drive to make it bootable when I used this method.