FAT32 vs FAT on 2 HDDs, want to resetup system

[nelljack]

I have a 20.4GB Maxtor HDD that when I formatted it it came up as a FAT32. My Conner 1.18GB is a FAT. I want to redo my system, but I am confused. I have been reading a lot of the forum's answers, but have not seen any like mine.

I want the 20.4GB to be my new C: drive. How should I go about setting this one up? I have:

AMD-K6 301MHz P2 mobo w/128MB ram
Win95/98 upg
AMIBIOS released 6/1998

I read that one should use the Win CD to do all the formatting/fdisking. Why? Does not the startup disk have the same programs?

Also, about partitions: should I split the HDD into smaller sizes or can I use one large and just copy all of the current C: drive files to it?

I'd like to upgrade my BIOS, but AMI.com shows none. Even the mobo company must have gone out of business. My system runs now, even using a LAN. It is just slow and hits are made to the 2 HDDs all of the time. I did some tweaking and it helped.

Any help will be appreciated.

 

[dakota81]

You can make that 20gig drive your primary drive if you want - and there's two ways to do that. You can install Windows fresh on the 20gig, then reinstall all your software, and you can still copy over any data from your old hd. Or you can get a hold of a drive copy program, one that's really good is Drive Copy from

http://www.powerquest.com

- it's not free, but it's still a good program to have. That will copy your old harddrive exactly over to the new drive, so you don't have to reinstall anything, or worry about any missing data in the transition.

You can keep the 20gig hd set up as one drive. If you want to split it into two partitions, that's entirely your preference.

About the BIOS, if it does everything you need it to do, don't worry yourself too much about updating. But if you really want to, you find the updates not on ami's website, but at the site of the company who made your motherboard.

 

[nelljack]

Thanks for your input. I'll check out powerquest, especially since I really don't want to do one-at-a-time reinstall of all programs, then have to download all upgrades/patches.

 

[jaeddy]

Maxtor has a program that comes with its drives, or that can be downloaded from their web page, that allows you to set up and clone an existing setup to a Maxtor drive (actually, all HDD vendors have a version of this utility available). It just requires that you have at least one Maxtor drive installed to use it, it is GUI based and very simple to use.

 

[nelljack]

Thanks, I did not know the diskette allowed that option. I'll check it out.

I still have one question from the original: can 2 HDDs have different FAT setups and run correctly, or should they both be the same? Mine are working but I'm just curious.

 

[jaeddy]

They can be different and they'll work just fine, but you can fomat the smaller drive as fat32 as well to reduce wasted slack space by smaller allocation units.

 

[nelljack]

Thanks. I will be working on this "redo" tonight or tomorrow.