I installed a 4gb FAT32 harddrive, to make a backup of my "C" FAT16 drive which is a 2gb partation of a 8gb drive, so that I could do some maintenance on the 8gb. I used the software (DiskWizard) that came with 4gb harddrive to copy the contents of the "C" drive and it appeared to work fine, but when I tried to boot from the 4gb drive as master I got "error loading os". Even tried the software DriveCopy by PowerQuest and got the same results. I believe the new harddrive may be bad?? anyone have any thoughts??????

lamar,

I assume you had to jumper the 4gb for slave when you first installed it. Once you transferred the OS & files over to the 4gb drive, did you shutdown and change the jumpers to make your 4gb master & the 8gb slave? Also would have to change bios (setup) to reflect the new slave/master config. The FAT 16/FAT 32 difference may also be causing a prob. I'll let someone else pick it up from here....Al???

G'day Lamar you may have to change the active partition from the other drive to the new one using Fdisk if you intend to boot from that one if they are both connected.

Yar nearly there Kevin - think compatibility of Operating systems and partition structure - that wot versions of Windows work with wot versions of FAT.

Ronnie got a good point as well - now work out how DOS assigns drive letters and possible problems because of additional primary partitions.

Think I've hit everyones thoughts so far. I'am running win98 second edition upgrade. I unplug the 8gb drive and change the jumper on the 4gb drive to master befor re-booting. BIOS detects change on bootup and I save changes. I've even convereted the 4gb drive to FAT16 using PartitionMagic and recopied the files, Still get message "error loading os" after BIOS update.

Are you sure the drive is formatted as a system disk? I.e. are you sure you've copied across the hidden, read-only system files?
Are you sure you've copied across the master boot record, or created a new one?
Have you tested the new drive as a second drive, and run scandisk on it? If it passes, then the disk should be fine.
It sounds like a boot problem, not a hardware problem. Can't you just install the OS on the second disk and copy across the application files?
It's a lot easier to answer a question with a question, isn't it?

P R O B L E M S O L V E D
I found the problem!!! When I compared the drive layout of the 4gb frive to the 8gb drive using PartitionMagic, I found that the first partition, primary, (with the MBR) was Unallocated and was only 7mb. The remaining space was a logical volume, which was where I was copying my files. Using PartitionMagic I created a partition in the 7mb primary area, deleted the logical 4gb partition and resized 7mb partition to use the remaining space on the harddrive. I was then able to copy to the 4gb drive and boot without any problems.
Thanks all;
Lamar