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We were given a bunch of 8 year old computers to share, 9 of them possibly 
with good motherboards (but bad drives).  Someone at a local senior 
housing place wants to help set up her neighbors with something resembling 
what they are learning to use at the library, which will be Windows 98 
with a wordprocessor (Cetus Wordpad free edition - about 1MB with 
spellchecker) and browser (Opera 9.23 - 3MB, down from the 8MB of 9.02).
Soeone gave us 98Lite Trial Version which installs Win98 to 150MB without 
the garbage.

We set this all up in 230MB, including 50 old DOS games, 
Ghostscript/Ghostgum, Camunzip, etc.

The first computer kept crashing so we moved the drive to another computer 
(which came with nonbootable 4GB drive so we thought that must be its 
problem) which also keeps crashing despite unplugging sound, modem, and 
CD-ROM drive and using a variety of different memory.  So we decided to 
clone the drive in case that is at fault (and to have clones for other 
computers as well).

DOS fdisk only makes one primary partition and we wanted 200MB for backup 
installation files on another primary partition.  BL3 fdisk made the 
second partition as type Win95 FAT32.  DOS formatted the first partition 
format /s (to make it bootable) and the second partition after I rebooted 
from BL3.  I already made the first partition active with DOS fdisk.  (I 
had to leave 45MB at the end unused since it choked on them).

I tried to copy with BL3 cp -a * but it turned 'Program Files' and 
contents into 8.3 with tildes.  Windows booted but Opera would not run and 
the icons had funny-looking names and were in the wrong places.

Then I tried to copy with Win98, which stopped when it hit the 16MB 
swap file.  As with linux, you should not copy from a running version.
(Linux because of /proc).  I use BL3 loop or floppy to copy BL2 and BL3.

BL had complained about not finding ext2 file system when I mounted the 
drives the first time.  Win98 uses vfat (the long file names).

I downloaded 2.2.26 vfat from the BL site modules, fs, copied it to disk 2 
of BL3.40 (it just fit - I need to make more copies of BL3.50), booted 
with only disk1 (Ctrl-C instead of inserting disk2 since I did not need 
the X files or modules) but mounted disk2 where vfat.o was

insmod /fd/vfat.o
mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /hd
mount -t vfat /dev/hdc1 /mnt
cp -a /hd/* /mnt

Turn off the computer (floppy linux does not care).  Switch hda and hdc.

I have a second bootable Win98 hard disk.  Much faster than copying with 
DOS or Win98.

If the disks were identical I could have used dd to copy (including 
partition tables) with the appropriate block size for the drives to speed 
it up even more.  I made a nice mess another time trying to do this with 
drives of different sizes.  Windows would boot but then get confused about 
sizes of partitions later, claiming it did not have space when it did.

Is there some way around this?  What I did was straightforward and fast 
enough.


If this drive also crashes in this computer the board is presumably bad. 
We will confirm by testing both drives in a known good computer.

I wish the library would teach linux instead of XP.

Sindi

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org