mbr fixes for xp clone drive?

Hi, I've read the threads in this xp forum, which came up when I searched on "mbr ". I didn't see an answer relating to my question, so here goes:

1- in my current setup, the MBR is on a drive containing w98se. TWEAKUI is installed. On boot, the drive and OS choices appear. Drive C: is always the win98se. Drive D: is always the XP drive. (Drive really means drive here, not a name for partitions on one drive. The C: is on one drive, the D: is on another physical hard drive.) Everything's ducky here, I boot right into XP 99.9% of the time, only use w98se as OS in looking at tech questions for that OS. The XP drive, when XP is the OS, remains the D: drive. It is NTFS.

2- I'm running out of space on those 2 drives. Now I want to move the XP OS to a 40G drive (this is drive #3). I have Ghost 2002. It supports NTFS. I have read the info on restarts after cloning, posted in this forum, so I have been duly warned about physically disconnecting the drives & in what order to prevent registry disasters, etc.

3- Finally, the question: what do I need to do to have the cloned XP OS on the new drive, boot?

Note again that the current XP setup reads info from a FAT32 MBR installed with the w98se. Now on the new drive I want the cloned XP OS to read its own MBR on its own drive (drive #3), which I want to be NTFS - MBR & XP OS, and some data. Will that be possible? What do I have to watch out for?

Thank you.

(P.S. Last very unimportant question: let's say it's a happy ending & the cloned XP OS boots from drive #3 MBR; would I still be able to boot into w98se using TWEAKUI & XP options, if I wanted to?)

 

You are thinking of doing more than you need to and some of it not a real great idea.

- XP 'owns' the MBR on your C drive. It set it's own structure on that section when you installed it dual-boot. And there are several other XP-boot files that really need to stay on C: regardless of what drive/partition you put the XP OS on.

- if, as I am reading things, you have enough room on C: for the 9X OS, just leave it there and you can continue to boot from it when/if you want.

- when you get the XP-OS placed where you want it, take a short trip to the Recovery Console and you can quickly get things working again as a dual boot system.

For general ease of conversion, I think I'd make the new XP-OS drive D: as it is now. Just use the XP device manager (once things are running again) to change the drive letter of the old drive that now holds XP. NTFS on either or both is fine and won't cause problems except that if you keep the old XP drive as a data drive and NTFS, your 98 load won't be able to see it.

The MBR (master boot record) does not take a file system structure like Fat32 or NTFS. It has it's own layout and isn't affected by a change in file storage structure.