Good day to everyone. This is the first time to try this type of a thing, so needless to say, I am lacking knowledge, and don`t really know if it is possible. I have an older computer with a small 3gig hard drive that is as full as the ticks on a dogs back. I didn`t know if it was possible to clone that hd with it`s 98se OS, and programs onto a larger known good 30gig hd. I ran into a program called HD Clone free edition V3.2.9 that according to it`s description is supposed to copy the entire drive of a smaller hd to a larger hd. You run the program, it creates a floppy, and through using the floppy, it clones the hd. Thought I would try it. I put the small drive in as master, and slaved the larger drive, which has been fdisked, partitioned, and formated. When I booted to the HD Clone floppy, HD Clone recognized both hd`s, and the program ran, and cloned the small hd to the larger hd(supposedly), all programs seemed to be on the large hd, including the os, which is what I was trying to acomplish. Now the rub is that when I remove the small drive completely, and master the the large drive, I cannot get 98se to boot, all I receive is a "Invalid System Disk" Replace the disk, and press any key. Well, like I said, above, I am really lacking in knowledge in this area, or even if what I am trying to accomplish can be done with what I have. Any thoughts/ideas will be much appreciated. Thanks for your time. Regards IKE

How did you partition and format the large drive? From your specs I suspect your computer may have size limitations for harddrives that are smaller than that drive. Watch the POST screens at startup to see if the 30Gb drive is identified by proper model and size.

Hi OtheHill, thanks for the reply. I used a 98se boot disk, selected boot without cd-rom support, at the A: prompt I typed fdisk command, after that, I enabled large drive support, deleted my partitions. Then went back to the main menu, created my primary partition, rebooted the machine, selected boot with cd-rom support, and at the A prompt I typed format c:. At the post, the 30 gig drive is identified as what it is a Maxtor 5T030H3, but there is nothing that says the size. Regards IKE

Run fdisk again and make sure the partition on the 30 gig is set active (option 2 from fdisk menu). Since you were using the 3 gig it was set active. If you already have an active partition in a system, fdisk will not set another one and without that you can't boot from it. So you'll need to have the 3 gig removed (or disabled in cmos/bios setup) in order to set the partition active on the 30 gig. Some copying software will also copy the active bit but I'm betting the one you used didn't do that.

Well, it sounds like the BIOS is properly identifying the new drive. When you used Fdisk to partition the new drive did you mark the primary partition as active? If not, then that MAY be why the drive isn't booting. Either that or something went wrong with the cloning process. Go back and use Fdisk again and choose option #4 which is to view. If the partition is active there will be an "a" somewhere to indicate that. I'm not sure if you can now make the partition active but I believe you can, using Fdisk. If that doesn't work reconnect the 3GB and view the partitions on it with Fdisk. It is possible the drive had an overlay installed on it. I doubt that is the issue but maybe. Just thought of something. Did you remove the floppy disk from the drive? You can boot back to the floppy drive and at the comand prompt type C:, if the invalid disk comes up, try D:. If a c: prompt is permitted then type dir/p. This will show what files are on the drive. The p is for pause, you can tap the spacebar after the first screen and it will scroll to the next. I haven't used the cloning utility you used. Did the instructions say to partition AND format the new drive?

Oh, and you said you typed 'format c:'. With the 3 gig as master and the 30 gig as slave running the format command on c: would have formatted the 3 gig and not the 30 gig. Hopefully you meant to say 'format d:'. If not you better check to make sure you still have your software on the 3 gig.

I missed that DAVE. I hope so also.