Will this work ??

[raksrules]

I have a machine with the following config:

Intel 845 GSLV Motherboard
80GB Samsung HDD
256 MB RAM
Samsung DVD Writer
On board graphics

On this machine i have four partitions (C,D,E,F) and D: has windows XP installed on it which i primarily use. On C: I had installed Windows 98 but after some issue i had to format C: resulting in Win98 being removed from my machine. But still at the startup it shows me both Windows XP and 98 and selecting 98 makes the PC go to a dead end (obviously). But this is not my problem. I saw the contents of boot.ini from msconfig and saw two OSes listed one XP as
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
and for another it is written as C:\"Microsoft Windows" with latter one referring to Windows 98.

Now the problem is that i have one more very old machine with 20GB HDD But the machine is not working any more. That HDD has Windows 98 installed on it is C: and D: of that HDD is almost empty. Now my question is that if i replace all the contents of my 80GB hdd one's C: (after taking a backup) with the contents of the C: from the 20GB HDD then will i be able to boot into Windows 98 on my newer machine. So effectively i will be now having Win 98 on C: and XP on D:

PS: This may be a noob question

[pimpom]

I don't see why it shouldn't work. WinXP in D: does not keep a record of all details of the 98 installation, only the boot.ini file that tells it that there are two OSes installed and where.

If you have a backup utility like Norton Ghost, I suggest you use that to back up the 20GB drive's C: and use the ghost file to restore it to the 80GB's C: partition.

There might possibly some problem you or I have not thought of, but I can't think of any right now. Just try it.

PS: I don't think it's a noob question.

PPS: I used to have 98 and XP, and even ME and XP in the same partition. This is not advised, but I never had any serious problem. The only thing was that AVG could be installed only for one OS, not both. Even that might have been solved with some registry editing, but my main AV was PC-cillin and AVG was only a backup, so I didn't bother.