My main computer died and i want to pull the hard drive out of it and put it in my backup computer, my problem is this, my main computer is xp pro and backup is 98se, any way to make 98 recognize the drive?

is the harddrive from xp formatted as ntfs or fat32 since 98se do not recognize ntfs. Depending on your backup pc if it has the juice to rub XP, just switch and make the one with xp on it as primary and you could dual boot

98 doesnt even recognize the drive no matter how i set it or the bios

why do you want to continue with win 98??

just boot from the other drive and pull the data from the win 98 drive to the other

i dont want 98, i want my xp hd to work on my 98 computer so i can use xp and my old information, but the computer with 98 to recognize it but i cant get it too

Originally Posted by KaleEros

i dont want 98, i want my xp hd to work on my 98 computer so i can use xp and my old information, but the computer with 98 to recognize it but i cant get it too

tell us the steps you've taken and tell us what is happening - or rather not happening.

did you install both hard drives in the machine?
have you set the old one as a slave
does it boot up into XP?
can you see the 98 drive from within xp?

i dont want 98, i want my xp hd to work on my 98 computer so i can use xp and my old information, but the computer with 98 to recognize it but i cant get it too.

If that's the case, why don't you try to convert 98se to XP? Is there any complications if you convert it to XP? Or pull out the hard drive on the main computer and put it in primary drive to run XP to your backup computer.

boot other drive as slave, then copy the data of other harddisk primary drive then format c of ur drive.

Originally Posted by KaleEros

i dont want 98, i want my xp hd to work on my 98 computer so i can use xp and my old information, but the computer with 98 to recognize it but i cant get it too

possibly the motherboard bios is too old to support the size of the drive and secondly taking a NT based OS (NT4, Win2k, XP etc) out of the machine it is set up in, and trying to make it run in a different machine ISN'T going to work unless the machines have EXACTLY the SAME hardware (MB) or are very very similar in hardware.

Your options are:
Replacement machine and set everything up from scratch.

Find the same MB as in your existing XP machine (Ebay, Amazon etc) and fit that in the case.

You might want to give this a try. Might work, might not, haven't tried it myself so I cannot attest to any results.

http://www.softlookup.com/display.asp?id=25391

i have a new computer now so i dont have to worry anymore guys, but thanks for your help!