How do I combine three drives into one?

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Himanattsu

Himanattsu

Reputable
Jul 31, 2014
11
0
4,510
I have three internal hard drives. One runs on Windows '98, one on Windows 7, and one on Windows 8. I also have an external 500GB SSD. In the end, I want to get each hard drive to be a partition on my SSD, so that I could boot any of the three partitions from my SSD on my laptop. There's no real reason to do this, I just thought that it would be fun and nostalgic to see my old, crappy computers run on high-end hardware. I know that just copy and pasting my files into my SSD isn't enough. I forgot the technical details of how to do what I want to do. Can anyone remind me of the details of how to do this?
 
Solution
USAFRet
Basically, you can't.

Presumably these OS's were originally installed in a desktop system?
You can't automagically move those partitions into a laptop drive, and hope that it will work.
Sort by date Sort by votes
Himanattsu

Himanattsu

Reputable
Jul 31, 2014
11
0
4,510


Thanks. These are all internal hard drives from laptops.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
USAFRet

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Mar 16, 2013
171,442
17,908
184,590


Even among different laptops, that often fails hard.


In theory, you could create the partitions on the drive, clone each of those into one of those partitions,
And then...maybe with EasyBCD, manipulate to boot info to actually recognize the 3 different OS's.
This might work with 7 & 8. No idea about Win98.


Nostalgia like this lasts about an hour. Then you go back to what you were using before...:lol:
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Eximo

Eximo

Titan
Ambassador
May 27, 2010
25,830
4,179
139,340
I haven't tried Win98 on a recent system. Pretty sure the amd64 CPUs can't handle the 16bit parts of it, but I don't recall if those were mandatory.

Simpler to run Win98 in a VM, though I still can't really think of why. Oldest legacy OS I have to run is XP for some software from a company that doesn't exist anymore. (Haven't tried App-V on it yet, maybe one of these days)
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Tom Tancredi

Tom Tancredi

Judicious
May 9, 2013
4,999
0
32,960


Totally agree, You want to 'run' something that the computer isn't made for, then run it in a Sandbox / VM solution. Simple to create a disk image ISO from the drives and then run that in a sandbox most of the time. The biggest issue I would see is when a 16 bit OS argues with the Win 7 and then Win 8 and forget if your base W10 is in the mix, all saying "I AM WINDOWS" and not playing nice and writing over the 'other fake Windows' settings causing all sorts of BootSec issues.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom