I'm giving my Dell Dimension 4100 (pIII/733/WinXP upgraded from Win98) to a
friend. He currently has an older HP desktop (PII/400/Win98).
What I would like to do is just remove the hard drive from the Dell, and replace
it with the hard drive from the HP. He will then have an upgraded PC with a
minimum of bother.
Is there any reason this wouldn't work?
It'll work, so far as you can put the HP drive in the Dell, but there's
still the operating system and drivers to set up.
Basically you can expect Win98 to plug-n-play the Dell system but there
are a few things that'll make it easier. While the Dell is still running
it's current OS, identify and accumulate a folder of drivers for Win98 for
all hardware. Might be good to have them extracted in an installable,
"browse to it from the hardware wizard in Windows" decompressed format on
a CDR, so if/when the time comes that your friend ever needs the driver
it's easier for him.
Then there's the previously enumerated hardware from the HP system, the
drivers installed and the registry. After moving the hard drive to the
Dell it may be easiest to boot into safe mode the first boot <F8> key
brings up the Win98 boot menu right after the POST/Enumeration screen,
then when it's booted to safe mode you could uninstall any drivers from
the HP in Add/Remove Programs, then in the regsitry, highlight the
HKey_Local_Machine/Enum Key (ONLY the ENUM entry) and delete it. If you
like you could export that key as a file before deleting it.
After the Enum reg key is deleted it's a matter of rebooting a few times
in regular (non-safe) mode and when Windows Plug-n-plays everything you
feed it the Win98 CD (it's much easier to just copy the Win98 folder from
the CD to a folder on the hard drive before the hard drive swap), or the
CDR you put the other drivers on.
So you reboot a few times and eventually you'll come to a point where
nothing's being pluged-n-played anymore and then go into Device Manager
and for any entries that have an exclaimation mark and a 2nd duplicate
entry, delete both of those entries and reboot... it make take a
half-dozen reboots before the whole process is complete but generally only
5-10 minutes (depending on the overall machine speed) if you have all the
files assembled beforehand.
Oh, almost forgot, after deleting the "Enum" key as I suggested above,
there is one registry entry you ought to recreate. I could post it but
it's just as easy to link to the file, it recreates a WDM sound entry,
http://69.36.189.159/usr_1034/Win98_WDM_Sound.reg
It should be merged into the registry right after you Delete the "Enum"
key, simply left-click on it to merge.
As always it's a good idea to make a backup of the whole HP drive before
pulling it out to place in the Dell system, but I usually don't, providing
the new host system is already confirmed stable, and that there's already
a fairly recent backup of anything valuable... which there should be
regardless of the whole system-swap situation.
