My daughter has a packard bell computer from a grandparent. The hard drive is 2 gigs with Windows 98 as it's operating system, and I want to replace the 2 gig hard drive with a 6 gig hard drive. The 6 gig hard drive was completely reformatted and win 98 was installed on it. It is now ready to be used. The hard drive that originally came with the computer is the 2 gig hard drive. I want to be able to copy everything over from the 2 gig hard drive to the 6 gig hard drive except the win 98 operating system that is on the 2 gig hard drive because I know that my version of Win 98 is working just fine and I have it's original CD. I have Norton Ghost 2000 Personal Edition that can copy some or all of the hard drive.Can only the operating system of the 2 gig hard drive be removed, leaving intact all other files.?If I can safely remove the Win 98 OS from the smaller hard drive then I can copy over the files that I want to the larger hard drive or better still, just remove the Win 98 O.S. and keep all other files on the smaller hard drive and use it as another drive without an operating system. Thanks to All

If by 'everything except the operating system' you also mean installed programs, no, it doesn't work like that - programs wouild need to be reinstalled all over again on the 'new' version of Windows Data can (of course) be copied without issue (music, pictures, documents etc.) If you intend to 'ghost' (copy) the old drive to the new one, there was no need to install Windows on that drive at all - once formatted you would connect as a 'slave' or secondary master and copy the original 2Gb drive over, then reconnect it as 'master' - - done. "completely reformatted and win 98 was installed on it" On a different machine? When Windows is installed, only the drivers required for that particular machine are installed - switching the drive to another machine usually means installing a completely different set of drivers (unless the machines are identical) We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true

(jboy may think he's hearing an echo) but no-when you remove the O/S, you also remove the registry right along with it. Many moons ago this might have been fesable (c. DOS/Win3.x days), but since win.ini controls so little on a "more-modern" O/S, it just can't be done that way anymore.

If you get an external hard drive or even just a thumb drive with enough space on it, you should be able to copy the majority of your data and programs if I'm correct in thinking. However, you would most likely need to use more than one thumb drive and the more space a thumbdrive has, the more expensive it is, so this should probably be your back-up plan. :) From, Vi.

Thanks everyone for the great advice. I think what I will do is ghost the 2 gig onto the 6 gig and be done with it. Gerry Jam

No problem, Gerry Jam. Let us know how you go with that. :) From, Vi.

That's probably the best way - those drive cloning programs copy everything over to a blank HDD, once you've reset that as the master drive, should be good to go. Once you've ensured that everything was duplicated properly, you can erase or delete files on the old drive (or even format) and fill it with whatever We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true