Drive "D" on a particular machine has bad clusters, and is developing more. This drive is a WD 2.1 Gig chained to a Bus Logic card with 16 megs of RAM. Drive "C" is a 540 meg drive, connected to the same Bus Logic card. Both "C" and "D" drives are on the Primary IDE line of the Bus Logic card. The system Bios reports drive "D" as a 2.1 Gig drive, but Bus Logic (when it loads) changes Heads, Sectors, and cylinders and likewise reports it as a 2.1 Gig drive. I am in the process of building a new machine since the machine I am talking about is a 486DX2-66 with 8 megs of RAM. All out programs are either DOS based, with exception of SAW, which is run under Windows 3.11. I have to copy drive "D" to a new 20 Gig Maxtor drive using the Maxi-Blast software. Am I going to be able to just pull the 2.1 gig drive out of the 486, set it up as the master drive, and use the 20 gig drive as the slave to get the info copied over to it? I would think so, BUT:

The way I see it, I might have to set the drive parameters to what the bus logic reports Drive "D" for this to work. Maybe I can use the orginal parameters that system Bios reports. What are your opinions?

I never was faced with this before, and I need your thoughts.

Thank you.

I then quite simply used Windows Explorer to copy the entire contents of the old disc to the new one. The only thing it won't copy is the swap file, but otherwise everything should go across, preserving long filenames and all (if applicable). This doesn't interfere with the FAT or formatting of either disc at all - it simply copies the files.

When all was done I removed the old disc, moved the new one over to primary master on the IDE bus, then booted from the new one. It worked first time.

I think the computer shop gave me a bum steer. I can always use the drives for something else, but if I partition the 20 gig drives to 2 gig partitions, it'll probably drive the Lantistic (puke) network crazy.

You can do a partition magic routine, but you might be better off installing win 98SE and getting the 32 fat. 99 percent of DOS programs will run on it, and even run under Windows DOS windows if you tweak the properties. I've even run 16 bit hex editors on 32 bit systems and they just saw the 16 bits they were used to.

The programs we are running are not compatible to anything else but DOS. It will not run under NT, Win 95, 98, ME, or 2000. It is in a department all by itself. There is nothing like it. It requires an Intel processor, and top-end ANTEX sound cards. The program developer could not make it run under anything but DOS. He battled with it for years to make it compatible with something other than DOS. The program is written in COBAL. Maybe that's why, I don't know.

It is a very expensive specialized program that makes and plays Audio MPEG's, at some goofy compression scheme that nothing else can touch. That's the Broadcasting Industry for you.

Some of the files were written so the duplicate file would self distruct in the process of copying through DOS.

I can say this specialized program is rock solid under the DOS enviroment, and for all practical puproses, 100% glitch free until a drive or other hardware goes "H" as in "Horse", and "S" as in "Shucks".

When programmers say their program won't run in Windows DOS virtual machines, they mean just that, and usually don't mean that the program can't run from a straight command prompt.

Since this is an expensive program, my bet is that the programmer included some copy protection schemes that are causing the trouble, and that the code would be more compatible without these. However, if the programmer says no, that is usually the end of story.

Four drives will tax the power supply of most computers. You'll need a quality one if you go that route.

A lot of folks used Lantastic, but I found it crashed and burned whenever it had to work with a directory that was loaded with files. Windows for Workgroups actually has a DOS client, which would allow you to access across the net to some 32 bit drives. I haven't set it up myself, and there are limitations to it, but it could be an improvement over Lantastic.

Actually, I have to do this to two machines, so I need two hard drives each. The machines we are running these programs on are 486's with 8 megs of RAM. But the 486's and the drives themselves are getting a little flakey because of their ages.

Thanks for all the input, guys. Very much appreciated.

I told the Driod in the computer shop that he was in error,and now he admits that. I guess he did not do too much DOS work, he is kinda young that works mostly on Windows 95 and 98. He apologized, and when I told him that I thought I made it clear that this is for DOS 6.22, but apparently he mis-understood me. I think that was a crop of crap. He knew, and gracefully took the drives back. I told him I was not going to waste a 20 gig drive for only 2.1 gigs.

With reference to Drive "C", I was able to Maxi-Blast it over, but drive "D" I couldn't. I suspected that anyway. Before I yanked Drive D, I ran a scan disk on it, it found some more bad clusters, but no lunched files. To add insult to injury, I could not even defrag it.

When it came to copy time, I could not do an Xcopy, as when it ran into the splattered files, it could not read them, then just dumped me. So, I re-constructed the directories and sub-directories, and copied them over. When it ran into the bad files, I just chose "ignore", and continued on its merry way. There were 12 files that were screwed up and could not read. Luck had it in my favor - they were locally made sound files in the SPC format, so no big loss anyway.

I checked for hidden files and shared files just to make sure everything was there.

Rebooted the new computer, and everything seems to be hunky-dory! I suspect that when I install the two Antex sound cards and the lan card, it'll run.

Again, I would like to thank all you people for the valuable input. I hope I have the chance to help you when your butt is in a bind.

Paul