Way off Topic, Win 98 - XP pro upgrade.

Looking for some input here.

I want to up grade a network workstation to XP pro. In an effort to not have to re-install all the existing applications, I was thinking of Ghosting the old hard drive, then taking the new hard drive and upgrading the existing Win 98 OS to Win XP pro. The theroy is: when the upgrade is done, I'd still have all the existing applications (MS Office, the accounting package, Email etc), still intact & working?? Is this realistic? Or is there a better way?

Thanks, Mike.

The theory is nice, but many, many programs, rather than being self-contained in their own little workspace (directory, folder) have pieces of themselves nestled into the registry, .ini and .dat files; \Windows and other Windows folders; and other directories.

So, be quite ready to have most of your original disks ready to reinstall.

I sure miss that about the DOS and Win3.x days! I could usually trace the entire program's tendrils, now it's much rarer to be able to just copy a program and have it start up.

RT

Mike, in theory this should work for most programs, but I'd keep that Ghost image handy because you just might need to go back to it. I've never had good luck with OS upgrades, but I have on occasion made them work ok enough to get me by.

Highly unlikely, especially in terms of user-settings and mail. All that aside, one big question hits me... Why upgrade that machine? A Win98 machine is fairly old, with all components being several years old. How much memory does it have? 256MB is barely livable on XP.

What shape is the physical hard drive in? They do degrade over time.

rdrast said:

Highly unlikely, especially in terms of user-settings and mail. All that aside, one big question hits me... Why upgrade that machine? A Win98 machine is fairly old, with all components being several years old. How much memory does it have? 256MB is barely livable on XP.

What shape is the physical hard drive in? They do degrade over time.

Click to expand...

I also have a new machine (w/new HDs). I've moved drives from machine to machine before without much diffuculty, but it's the OS upgrade I'm concerned about. There's actually 4 machines to upgrade & I was looking for a way to save a LOT of time as all the existing applications will remain. After the entire upgrade is complete we are going to migrate to a new accounting system which requires XP pro.

I have XP pro on two other machines, but they were new installs, (reload all the applications etc..). But now one of the application disks (the old accounting system) is damaged & unusable, and the vendor cannot supply me with a copy. This is the other reason for wanting to take this approach.

Thanks, Mike.

Dual Booting Option

Another option if you have spare HD space is to partition it and install XP on a separate partition. The beauty of this is you can select which operating system you want to load when you reboot.

My main internet surfing PC at home is an older P2 400Mhz 256mb that had Win98 initially installed in 1999 and then I added XP SP2. I still use Win98 for my scanner (UMAX that requires you to PURCHASE driver updates to run WinXP, I'm "thrifty" so that's not going to happen). I surf with Firefox in the XP OS. The down side is this machine takes forever to load on startup but once it's running, pages load as fast as the DSL will allow. The XP OS is ghosted so that if anything does crash or a virus/trojan, etc. gets through, I'm up and running in about 15 minutes.

With limited memory, don't try to multitask by openning numerous applications as the hard drive will thrash constantly as the pagefile.sys gets quite a work out.

The problem with creating another partition is the old apps are not included. Mike, what you propose is for the most part how it is done when replacing old machines with new ones.

The issues come in when you take the ghost to a new drive on a different system, it will probably need the W98 disk so it can re-install mobo and component driver info.

Once running on new hdd in new system you should have minimum problems doing the upgrade. I assume each workstation belongs to different people so I would upgrade each unit on its own i.e. do not attempt to ghost one old system then use it for all 4 of the new ones.

There are numerous ways to do this, my preferred method would be take the old w98 hdd and put in new system as boot drive, as mentioned may have to have w98 install cd. Once running then ghost it to other drive, set that drive as boot drive, then do upgrade. Old drive is intact and can still be used in old system as backup. New system can now be upgraded to XP.
All the apps should work but as mentioned have the install disks available if possible. The method I mentioned allows you time to transition from old to new if necessary.