"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
news:znr1069525158k@trad
Glenn Booth writes:

I guess there is a
potential pitfall in that putting the old OS onto the new machine can
cause problems, especially if you use it to boot from. It could have
different chipset inf files, drivers etc. that might cause it to
fail to boot.

Any version of Windows since 95 will boot in the "safe" mode without
any special drivers. That would be enough to get it to see the CD with
the new version of Windows. Once that starts cranking, it should load
all the drivers it needs for the hardware that it finds. This is why
it's a good idea to start this procedure with a clone of a working (on
an older OS) drive rather than just stick that drive in the new
computer and update it. At least you still have a working drive if the
update fails.

95 to 98 isn't such a big deal, as they are both kind of DOS based.
Win2k and XP can be more problematic, especially since MS seem to
change to version of NTFS at every opportunity.

Good thought. And in fact, there may be an advantage to using NTFS in
an audio machine.

IMO, make that more than a *might*. While FAT32 can in theory manage large
hard drives, in practice FAT32 gets awkward for drives larger than some
loosely-defined *barrier* which I put some place around 40 GB.

The most obvious very practical advantage of NTFS is that you can pull-the
plug on XP and not have any reason at all to run Scandisk the next time you
boot. In fact, if you ever see CHKDSK running in XP, it's a probable sign of
hardware or driver failure.

Also, NTFS is not the only practical advantage for XP. We are quickly
evolving into a world where WDM is the prevailing OS-level audio interface.
The *best* implementation of WDM has arguably been in XP since Service Pack
1, if not before.

If you support certain kinds of USB devices, XP is also advantageous. For
example, if you have XP the increasingly-popular memory-chips-on-a-key-ring
work without loading a special driver. The generic XP driver is fine. Not
so with Win98 ME or SE. You have to load a special driver from *someplace*,
and all the ones I know of are product-specific. That means three different
drivers per machine, if you have three people who want to carry files around
on three different ones.