What's the best way to move a bootable win98 partition?

Asked by treetaxi

I have 2 physical hard drives on my system, both of which have a bootable windows 98 partition.

The reasoning behind this was that my original w98 partition crashed while installing an MDP-130 tv-tuner, and rather than let the windows virus overwrite my MBR & make my serious OS un-reachable, I did a new install on another drive, -- so now when I want to watch TV I have to switch the cables on my hard-drives.

so now I'd like to clean out the w98 partition on my working hard-drive & do a bit-by-bit copy of the w98 partition on the play drive so that the current grub (which will boot a broken w98) will boot to (a copy of) the new installation.

I have the impression that a simple 'cp *' won't quite work. I'm thinking cpio but not sure how to go about it. -- also I seem to remember a better choice whose name I can't quite recall.

would windows backup&restore work?

is there a minimum number of critical win files that I need to keep & then copy all others from the working version? - like sys.ini & the registry files &c.?

any thoughts welcome.

thanks in advance.

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Ricardo Cropalato de Melo
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cablop (cablop) said :
#1

Commercial solution is Partition Magic. The Open Solution is GpartEd.

The method is to copy the partition into another one with similar features, i mean, primary partition to primary partition. Then you must make new partition the active one if it was. It is no hard. If drive letters does not change all is done.

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treetaxi (treetaxi) said :
#2

I'll keep it in mind, but it sounds like overkill. -- I'd like to get as many suggestions from as many people as possible.

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Best Ricardo Cropalato de Melo (ricardo-cropalato) said :
#3

If this disks have the same size, you can use "dd";
If you only want to fix your boot, you can use grub-probe or you can edit the grub menu.

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treetaxi (treetaxi) said :
#4

Thanks Ricardo Cropalato de Melo, that solved my question.