Anne; Interesting situation! Your 4Gb HDD is currently holding your /home partition? Brave! Very Brave! That hard drive has to be 2 or 3 years PAST it's MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure), and it's holding your personal data?
I'd like to suggest that you skip the new hard drive idea, unless you want a large drive for storage, and stick with the 2 20's. I'd reccommend setting up Windows 98 on the first drive, with ML8.2 nestled right in beside it. Using 5 Gigs for Win98, and 6 for 8.2, would leave you with roughly 8 or 9 Gigs for storage, and if you formatted the last partition using FAT32, both O/S's would have unlimited access to it. When you start the installs, make sure your 4 Gb drive is also connected, but change the "Mount Point" to something like "/temp", and DO NOT format it. Later, you can drag 'n' drop all relevant files from your "/temp/anne" folder to the corresponding folder(s) on your Mandrake installs (yes,...both of them). When your 9.0 CD's arrive, install it on the second 20 Gig drive, again using 6 Gigs for the install, and the remainder for storage. If you store all your downloads, documents, graphics, etc., on the storage partitions, you should be able to re-install broken O/S's without fear of losing or compromising any important data. You should have No problem re-locating your Win98 "My Documents" folder to one of those storage partitions, simply by right-clicking the desktop folder > Properties > > Move. After that, all documents will be automatically saved there, and recalled from there when re-opening them. Each version of Mandrake installed will write a new "lilo.conf" file, and should easily find all the other O/S's you have on the system. This will also allow you to quickly restore most anything simply by running the "Expert Upgrade" option in either Mandrake CD set that you have. Once your installs are finished, and you've copied your original /home folder contents from the 4 Gb drive, un-mount it from your system, make sure your "fstab" files are written properly, shutdown the system, and remove it. That way, you'll always have it available for emergencies, but it won't get any older, nor will it face potential damage from power failures. Occasionally, you can reconnect it and copy your /home data onto it for updated storage of critical information, then un-mount and store back on a shelf. Just a suggestion, but definitely safer than relying on that old hard drive. Lanman On Sun, 2002-11-03 at 09:16, Anne Wilson wrote: > I'm expecting my pre-ordered disks any day now, and, in the light of problems > others have had with hardware no longer working, at least out of the box, I > have to make decisions. At the same time, I feel that I have a HDD > catastrophe waiting to happen. > > Currently I have two 20Gb disks and a 4Gb installed. You can guess how old > that one is (it has my /home on it), but the others are not so young either. > > I think the best solution for the moment is to keep win98 (I still have a > couple of essential apps there), keep Mdk 8.2 and install Mdk 9.0 as well. > It would not, I think, be sensible to put in a fourth disk, so I'm wondering > whether to put the lot onto 1 large disk, or split the os's - perhaps win98 > on a separate one? Any pros and cons? > > If I back up /etc /home /root and /var can I take it that I could find and > restore any settings (including my mailboxes) that I may need? > > I presume that if I do this it would still be wise to install win98 first. > Are there any problems about installing the two versions of Mdk after that? > I know some of you do have more than one. > > Finally, if and when I get Mdk 9.0 as I want it, is it straightforward to get > rid of 8.2 without risk to win98 and 9.0? I would guess that it is simply a > matter of reformatting that partition and then re-running lilo. Am I right? > > Any more thoughts? > > Anne
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