How do I install an operating system to a secondary hard drive?

Thnak you so much!  What an excellent way to word your reply.  You made it sound so much easier than I thought it would be.  

If you want to preserve your current installation under 98 you could:

(best)
Install your new drive
Boot with a win98 startup disk
Use Ghost to clone your new drive
Swap jumpers so that new drive is primary

(This ought to work if you don't want to buy Ghost)
Install your new drive
Boot with a win98 startup disk
Partition new drive as D:
Format D: /s
XCOPY c:\*.* d:\*.*
Swap jumpers so that new drive is primary
Use FDISK and mark the new partition Active.

You may also consider using XXCOPY (freeware for personal use, shareware otherwise) to do this move.

XXCOPY is a great little copy utility, with about a thousand command-line switches.  For moving all of the information from one drive to another (including the O/S), you would:

       . connect the new drive as D:
       . FDISK                         (initialize a partition)
       . FORMAT D:                     (init volume for file access)
       . XXCOPY C:\ D:\  /CLONE        (copy all the files)
       . connect the new drive as C:
       . FDISK                         (set active partition)

    When XXCOPY is carrying out the clone operation, you don't have to sit idle.  You may actively use the computer as usual, browsing the Web, operate a word processor, or use a spreadsheet -- whatever.  Just consider the on-going XXCOPY operation a background task.  There may be a few files which may not be copied the first time due to file-access contention.  That is expected and not a serious problem at all.

    Once the first round of XXCOPY /CLONE operation is over, finish your foreground work, and close all active programs.  Then, run the exactly same command again.

           XXCOPY  C:\  D:\  /CLONE

    The key here is that the /CLONE operation behaves as an incremental backup.  It compares the source volume and the destination volume and skips files which already exist in the destination with the same size and time.  The second /CLONE step should take only a few minutes at most.

    You may still observe a few failed copies.  The most notable one in the Win9x system is the virtual memory swap file (WIN386.SWP).  In the case of Win NT4 and Win 2000, the equivalent file is named PAGEFILE.SYS.  It is safe to ignore these swap files.

see http://www.xxcopy.com for more info.  (No, I am not affiliated in any way.  I just like the utility).

When you say that you would like D to become "primary", do you mean it would become Primary in the sense of Slave/Master configuration, or do you mean this would become your default boot drive when you startup your PC?

You can use ms backup already in windows98.
Your d: drive must be set as active from fdisk
Go to start,programs,accessories,system tools,backup
"if there's no backup utility, in control panel| add\remove programs|windows setup|system tools click details and mark backup and click apply".

Restart to safe mode, open backup, set the options on dropdown of utility to under job perform unattended backup and under advanced backup check to backup registry.

Now check the drive box for c: under what to back up,  set to it be backed up to the d: drive under where to backup.

After its backed up do a restore, under restore|options click the box to restore registry,find backup file under restore from and change the where to restore to d: instead of original location.

After completed your disk should be able to boot to win98.

But instead of changing jumpers just yet, see if your bios will allow you to boot to d:, normally in advanced settings, just to make sure everything went well.

I've done it about a dozen times and as long as you follow the correct procedure it will work everytime.

As a madder of fact its worked everytime except when I forgot to set the drive as active "a couple of times.

Also save the backup file so if your os gets corrupted you can restore it.
This restore procedure also works if you install a fresh copy of win98 and want to restore it back, incase some day you have to do a fresh install because of one problem or another or restore only selected files, your choice.

Hope it helps.

Darryl

Also when you start it, a message will come up no back up tools found would you like to search or something, click no.

Windows 98 system IS NOT ATTACHED TO IT'S LOCATION WITHIN HDD PARTITION. So you wish to preserve your previous OS data just do the following:

1. Make Win98 bootable diskette.
2. Plug your 80 GB hard drive as secondary/slave.
3. Boot from Win98 diskette.
4. Run FDISK and switch (5) to your secondary drive. Partition it. Make the primary partition of your 80 GB drive active. Exit FDISK. Note that in Fat32 it is impossible to create partitions larger that 32 GB. Reboot.
5. Boot from diskette again. Format your newly created partitions. You can see these letters using FDISK. The primary partition of the new drive will become disk D:. The next, type "sys D:" in the command prompt. Drive D: will become system drive. Reboot to your Win98 system.
6. In Win98, go to Explorer. Make it show hidden and system files (View\Folder properties\View\Files and folders\Hidden files\Show all files). I use localized Win98 so actual menu names may slightly differ from that I had written before.
7. In Explorer, copy ALL CONTENTS of the disk C: to D:. Turn off PC.
8. Unplug your old drive. Make your 80 GB drive primary master.
9. After you turn PC if you made previous steps carefully you will boot into your Win98!

I am a system administrator and I often use this trick to upgrade HDD or to backup and restore system data!

Best regards, msa2003

The answer I got from Sunbow matched what I needed to know in a logical and easy to understand format, step by step.  Thank you!

Thanx.
                                                               -[Good Fortune]-