SG Broadband Community

i have 2 questions

1. when installing win98, do you have to format the hard drive you install it onto? does it do it automatically? if not, can you partition a drive that has data on it safely? i have some backups on that drive and i wanted to install windows on the rest of it.

2. once i do install windows, can i use winace to extract the win98se cd i have backed up on that 10 gig to a hard drive and install win98se over win98 with no problems? right now all i plan to do (until i get paid) is install regular win98 on the 10 gig and install drivers and stuff and just play games. any help would be appreciated. thanks.

6

u dont have to format but try to run scandisk and defrag on it if u can.

win98 install scandisks automatically, and it doesn't format automatically? cool. can i partition a drive with data on it safely?

Originally posted by 6[sic]6
win98 install scandisks automatically, and it doesn't format automatically? cool. can i partition a drive with data on it safely?

partition magic, no i dont have it

i partitioned a drive with pm6 once and it happily lost all my mp3's for me. i hate them.

had no problem partitioning with PM6. and i had heeps of data, didnt loose one thing

Yes, the only way is to use PM6. I've used it a couple of times with total success. However, I dont advise people to use unless it is necessary. It does something wierd to the drives that a native FDISK doesnt do. I read it a while ago, and i believe it to be true. Whenever possible, use FDISK. However, since you need to have a new partition and keep the data I would suggest the following. First of all, defrag your hard drive first. Also, make sure you have plenty of room around where the partition is going to be made. For example, if you have a single parititon 10 gig and you want 2 5 gig partitions. Dont have 4.5gigs of data before you run PM. You will run a risk of losing some of it.

Lastly, if you do lose any data; PM me. There is a nifty program that will recover formated data for you. Unless it was overwritten, it works great!