Backing up hard drive

Yes m8 take your 30gig hard drive out of that machine and then put it in your other one as a slave drive, make shaw that you change the settings on the hard drive to slave which is at the back of the unit. <br />You will be able to transfer all your files with no probs......<br />Any probs just get back to us m8..........Gazer <img src="wink.gif" border="0">

Sorry Gazer, I must have misled you slightly, the 30 GB H/D & 40 GB H/D Are in the same Computer,set to master & slave, The 30 Gb holds the O/S and program files etc. The 40Gb is blank at the moment it is used for Digital Video work.<br />I would like to transfer the O/S and files to the 40 Gb drive, I was going to try drag and drop but I am unsure will the 40 Gb drive when set as master work from boot up.<br />In the past all my back-ups were done to C/D.

Regards<br />vat19 Keep up the Great work <img src="wink.gif" border="0">

The best thing you can do is copy all your documents and important files to the empty 40 gig drive, put it all in one folder called backup1.

The take your 30 gig one out and throw it in the bin.

Now install a frsh copy of windows onto the 40 gig one, reinstall all your programs and copy all your documents back to their rightfull places.

<br />I know that you want to just backup the whole thing to the other drive so you can keep your OS and everything intact, but unfortunatly this very rarely works.

When you copy all your files across some of them will be in use by windows so you won't be able to copy them, this is where you start getting problems with missing files and so forth.

The best way is to just backup all your important documents and have a fresh install of windows.

The best way to do this is to use Norton Ghost but you said u were having problems. Boot with a bootable floppy to a dos prompt then run ghost from a floppy. Choose to do disk to disk and select the 30Gb H.D.D as the source and the 40GB as the destination and press ok to ghost. It will transfer the data exactly from one drive to the other...it will also stretch it out to fit a 40Gb drive so you wont even need to extend the partition afterwards (also if your drive is partitioned it will copy this across too!) what a cool programme <img src="graemlins/dizzy.gif" border="0" alt="[dizzy]" /> <img src="graemlins/dizzy.gif" border="0" alt="[dizzy]" /> <img src="graemlins/dizzy.gif" border="0" alt="[dizzy]" /> <img src="wink.gif" border="0">

Also forgot to mention....U said you had trouble getting to a dos prompt in Win ME? Just use a windows 98 boot disk or CD (Set BIOS to boot from CD-ROM) and choose to boot with CD-ROM support....this will get u to a dos prompt and allow you to run the software. And it has no relevance that the O/S is ME and not 98 <img src="wink.gif" border="0">

Cheers Gazer,Mikimac & Junglist, <br />thanks for your replies.<br />I never thought of starting in DOS from the floppy,that's a good idea.<br />it's just that restarting computer in Win 98 you have the option from the drop down menu to restart in dos mode whereas in Win M/E you don't.

Thanks for all your help, I just purchased a new 60 Gb. H/D today ( £130) so I have some work ahead<br /> of me reinstalling all those ****ing drivers etc.

many thanks again,<br />vat19

[ 28 November 2001: Message edited by: vat19 ]</p>