Swapping drives between two Windows 3.1 systems

If the systems are "similar" up to the point where graphics adapter is the same model, it could be painless. Otherwise, setting the "new" drive as primary is justifiable only if it has very hard-to-find software or something on it that can't easily be reinstalled. If the drive is to be used as boot drive (primary), the graphics driver should be set to "VGA" or something before the move, otherwise you may have to do some hand editing of the .ini files to get anything on screen afterwards. There is no "Plug-n-Pray" in win3.1; as far as I remember it crashes ungraciously if it can't handle the vid card.
/RID

yeah, there's a setup you can run from DOS though to change the vid card to VGA or SVGA if it has the SVGA driver pack installed.

you can surely change the disk from which the system should boot but not the os which is on a different hard disk. well if that looks stupid its ok because that was what i h ad understood from the question i.e the client has a system with win 3.11 and he wants to boot from another hard disk.

anyhow first of all if he is using 3.11 that system might be pretty old and it may not recognise the latest hard discs and the bios may not have the additional features. and the system can boot only from a primary master hard disk or a secondary master disc

bhanu

Wow!  Talk about stretching the ol' memory :-)

These systems MAY be old enough to even have an issue with the old 504mb BIOS barrier.   Do you know the size of the hard disks involved??

In any event, I'll assume since they're of the same vintage that the disks are within the limits of the systems' BIOS capabilites -- whether 504mb or 8gb.   Assuming that 504mb is not an issue; then the only size restriction will be the 2gb FAT-16 limit.   So if the drives are larger than 2gb, they have to be partitioned in 2gb "chunks."

But that is most likely an academic discussion -- since they're both coming from similar sets of hardware, the drives are almost certainly partitioned correctly and do not exceed any BIOS size restriciton.   So on to your specific questions:

"... does 3.1 recognize more than one drive at a time?" ==>  Yes.   You can have both drives installed (and in fact, they can have -- and may require -- multiple partitions, so they may show as MANY drives).

"... Can I set it up as a master/slave configuration in the event that it does not work as the primary?" ==> Yes, from an IDE channel perspective.   However, many BIOS's of that era did not provide any way to boot except from the Primary Master device.

Assuming you are correct when you state the systems are "... of similar specs ..." this should not present any problems.   The only one I can think of offhand would be what rid suggested -- if they have different video cards you may have to initially set VGA resolution; and finding the correct driver for the other card may be very interesting (if the video card isn't the problem they're trying to overcome, I'd move it as well).

Thanks Experts,

I don't have any further details on the specs other than what I mentioned above but I should be meeting with them over the weekend.

I'll post again here once I've attempted the swap and let you know my comments and score up the points.

Cheers,

Auriclus

oh, bear in mind that if these are older systems, the drive probably won't be autodetected on boot. Unless it happens to be the exact same model that's in there.  In that case you will either have to go to a harddrive detection menu in BIOS to set it up, or it's possible if these are extremely ancient systems that you will have to enter the C/H/S parameters manually in the Standard Setup screen. Make sure you set the parameters identically to how they are set on the system the drive is currently residing in. There were 2 methods of ~540MB+ compatibility on older systems, and if the type was set to LARGE and not LBA then the system won't read it or will read it with errors if it was set to LBA in the second system (and scandisking at that point would royally screw it up) So, take down the CHS info and the compatibility setting type from the system you are removing it from, to make sure you get it set the same on the second system.

C=Cylinders, H=Heads S=Sectors.

If for some reason the "translation" used on the system the drive is currently in does not match the specs of the drive as they are given online or printed on the drive, then DO NOT use those specs. If it was formatted with a different translation, the "correct" translation will not work, so you have to have it set how it's set now.

regards,

Road Warrior

Heh whoops, I wasn't really clear there, I meant if the current translation is different than the specs given online or on the drive, then use the current translation in the second machine and not the specs given online or printed on the drive, otherwise it won't work.

It's likely that it will autodetect okay; but not absolute.   It's unlikely that LBA is an issue -- the system probably doesn't even support LBA access.   Logical block addressing was implemented to allow the use of drives larger than 8GB -- which probably was well after these systems were made.