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backing up and restoring windows 98 Installation

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First post, by Eimer

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I have the following issue.
Most of my retro systems have an either 40 or 80GB drive with two partitions splitted in 50% of the entire capacity of the drive.
when I put a drive in the secondary IDE channel with my extension bay, it puts this drive as D: and pushes the previous D: partition to E:
therefore, games I installed on D: don't work properly when the second HDD is present.

so I thought, screw it, I need to merge both partitions of the first drive.. but extending the first partition doesn't seem to be possible, so I have no choice but to reformat.
I don't want to reinstall Windows as I have plenty of stuff installed and everything is working properly.

So I was thinking of backing up all the files with all of its attributes to the second drive, reformatting the first drive, recreating the MBR with format /s, and copying everything back.

Would this work without any issues?

I was thinking of using xcopy with this, would this work? or should I use something better, but what?
If xcopy would work, what parameters do I have to use?

Reply 1 of 6, by Zerthimon

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You can copy the data from d: to c:, then use gparted to delete extended dos partition and logical drive and after that extend the primary partition to occupy all free space.

Reply 3 of 6, by konc

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You will you need to use the xcopy from within windows (opening a command prompt) to be able to use the extra parameters that copy hidden and system files and maintain attributes, as well as LFNs.

So while you can use it to create a good copy, you won't be able to copy everything back the same way on the same PC after formating. Xcopy in MSDOS mode doesn't have the same parameters available and won't retain the LFNs.

I suggest using something like gparted to just merge the partitions.

Reply 5 of 6, by stanwebber

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gparted is available as a standalone bootable iso. libparted dropped support for shrinking fat32 file systems at some point, but extending fat32 file systems continues to work. look for an older gparted version if you need to shrink. a previous post by me probably references an actual cutoff version.

i routinely back up win98se with nothing more than p7zip. i use grub as my windows bootloader as it is easier to deal with.

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