Thanks to you all for the time and trouble you took to reply. My first post wasn't clear enough so I tried harder in the second.
Both BIOSs are Phoenix but different generations. My other "spare" HDD is 2.1GB loaded with Windows 95 and I can swap it backwards and forwards between the two PCs to my heart's content, allowing for the paroxisms of agnoy it goes through when it keeps meeting new hardware. I just ignore most of the driver requests because I'm only doing these installations for a particular reason and not to have a fully working W95 or NT4 setup.
References to BSOD and Plug and Pray
don't apply to my problem as I wasn't even getting to the boot menu - y'know the
one that asks you to select which OS you want (as in Win2K). I believe because the younger PC (Beta) wasn't finding the boot sector.
Mac t K, for my propose, a raw NT4 installation is ideal even though (because?) it's not PnP; I can load it with its default drivers quickly and get a working set-up. So, that's what I did after using DOS to reset the partitions to two 2GB FAT. Using the newer PC (Beta), NT4 loaded like it used to, and it's updated to SP6 using defaults. No additional sound, graphics or modem drivers or printers, just SCSI to run the tape drive. And now I
CAN swap the drive between the old and newer PCs without a problem. Interestingly, if I look at the partition info using DOS and FDISK, I get slightly different results! But the results in NT4 Disk Administrator are the same. You'd have liked NT4 for its stability, but loading hardware was a lengthy process. But as it was really meant to be a Server, hardware wasn't a major consideration. Its Hardware Abstraction Layer (Mrs fob loves it when I talk about my HAL!
) did protect the kernel from most problems.
So it was a BIOS/partitioning problem that Partition Magic could see but not fix. The BIOS in PC Alpha was probably misguided if not actually lying about the translation method to use on the HDD; hence wrongly reporting the number of sectors as 240 instead of 255.
Master Green, "Right ON" but I tried your solution re "Auto" and "User" early in the drama and it didn't work, sadly. (Hair? I remember hair!)
And F-b-W I did try the Non-PnP toggle in BIOS and that didn't work either; recall that no OS came into play here at all. Tried the reset jumper on the MoBO of PC Beta too!
Given that no-one in their right mind would go back from Win2K to NT4 why did I bother? Well I had a bunch of old 2GB backup tapes that I couldn't get the data off using Veritas Backup Exec Pro 4.5 running on Win2K. So I decided to re-create the set-up on which the backups were created; that was Seagate Backup Exec 2.0 running on NT4. (Seagate 2.0 wouldn't run on Win2K)
It worked, and the data is pouring (trickling) off these 5/6 year old tapes as I write. So it was worth it.
All this mass of data has made me question the wisdom of doing so-called "Full Backups" regularly. There is no need for me to have eleventeen backed-up copies of Application Files that come on program disks or of letters, spreadsheets etc that are old. So I'm reviewing seriously the plan for regular backups in the future.
One of the most important things to BU is the Backup Catalogue Directory itself! It can take half a day to catalogue even a 2GB tape just to find out what's on it! Even more bizarre is the fact that Seagate (now Veritas) make the catalogue directory an exclusion from backups! That's one of the first things to sort out in the Registry when I return the kit to normal.
Thanks again, it was all worth it! Now a happy bunny.
