Making a disk image / Windows 98

[sjh]

In order to avoid the chore of rebuilding my system from scratch as I've had to do several times this year I'm planning to add another hard disk to my system and then utilize a program that will enable me to store onto it a duplicate copy of my primary hard disk. It seems to me, though, that once Windows knows that this second drive is available it may decide to utilize it for other operations. Is there some way that I can "fence off" this drive so that Windows doesn't mess with it? Or don't I have to worry about this?

[glc]

Just disconnect the IDE and power cables after you make your image.

[Stephen092578]

Another option is to partition your hard drive with a 70% primary and a 30% extended partition. Example Total size= 10GB, Primary=7GB and Extended=3GB. Once you have formatted and installed Win98SE on the C: then use Ghost or similar software to create a Partition image. What this will do is take a snapshot of you C: and save it to a file on your D:. If your system ever blows up again, boot with a floppy\CD and pull the image back over to C:. This is a great time saver.

[glc]

I prefer to keep my images on a different drive or on removable media, this adds one more layer of safety. Otherwise, if the drive fails, there goes your image too.

If you use imaging software instead of cloning software, you don't have to worry about Windows messing with the other drive - it contains only an image and it's not bootable.