Tale of Installing the Sword Coast

[mir_ror]

The "hardware conflicts" are those (hypothetical) nightmarish scenarios where you fork out a monstrous sum of money for some RAM/sound-cards/hardisks (?) just to discover that your basic hardware is just not compatible with it - I just want to know what I'm getting myself into if I am going to install a new hard-disk.
I've been surfing for more info about FAT32, and it seems that there is another version of Win 95 with it - the Windows 95 Operating System Release 2 (OSR2), apart from Win 98. Right now, I'm trying to find out how to upgrade my OS to FAT32 with minimum fuss and pain.
Thanks again for all the extremely FAST responses to my query (although I'm still open to more )!

PS Can I just install Win 98 over my current Win 95?

[stred]

hey slag_king as mir_ror said correctly win95 osr2 had fat32.
hey mir_ror as slag_king said correctly partition magic 5 is the easiest-safest way for these modifications.(in all the good warez sites you will find it for free)

p.s. mir_ror installing a new hd is probably the easiest thing to install in a p.c. (=no conflicts,no drivers just a fdisk,format and u are ready),just make sure that u have the proper type of controllers for the new hd.

by controllers, he means EIDE...not the Ultra IDE which just came out not too long ago (you can use it on regular IDE controller, but it actually slows down the transmission rate rather than make it the same rate as the regular EIDE) or SCSI.

Ah, yes, I've forgotten about the 95.2 (as I call it). It has more bugs than anything I've seen, and it's pretty useless.

You can write 98 over 95, but be prepared for loss of data and junk data. If you want to start clean, you might want to save your data that you need, and then format your harddrive. Then install Win98 (I suggest the second edition). Then you can reinstall everything. But wait, before you do that, be sure to get the drivers for your hardware saved on disk. I suggest you cruise the internet and get the drivers from the companies rather than your current batch. And save yourself Direct X 7.0a because win 98 puts in 5.0 (I think).

And if you don't like warez sites, PM 5 can be bought for less than 50 dollars. It was the best purchase for me because I have too many osses to work with.

By the way, a collegue of mine has a nice computer with everything SCSI, and he complains that he doesn't have much difference playing games on it than on my computer (which is SCSI free!). Well, duh! You don't need SCSI to run games because the rate of information between everything is pretty small compared to something huge like Graphics-intensive or Math-intensive programs. SCSI works well when there's a bunch of information that needs to be transferred between two machines such as the hard drive and the CD-ROM. Admittedly that SCSI computer works real nice when I compile stuff and rendering graphics!

[mir_ror]

Okay, I've been doing my own crash course on hard disk installation during this week-end (since I can't access my computer on normal week-days) and this is basically what I've uncovered (courtesy of a certain David Risley [who knows, it might even be one of you guys!!] at hardwarecentral.com):

There 3 stages in preparing a hard disk for use:
(Low Level Formatting, done by manufacturers) -> File Sys setup/Partitioning (eg FAT32/NTFS/HPFS) -> High Level Formatting (aka DOS formatting)

And that there are 3 types of hard disk interfaces (threes, and threes, and trees... I'm getting a headache already ):

1. SCSI - It seems that these interfaces are damn complicated to configure (having a special end-device for the terminating device and whatnot) and, what's worse, there are no set standards for them at all -> thus different makes from different manufacturers may conflict with one another.
2. IDE - This seems to be the safer, but slower choice of many people.
3. EIDE - The Enhanced version of the above, but I'm not clear how much more enhanced it is ('...able to take advantage of the PCI interface from your new video card...' ?)

As usual, any comments/criticism about the info above is always welcome !

Do any of you have any informative, reliabe, and (most vital of all) frequently-updated sites about this (or any hardware-related) topic? What are the brands to look out for? I heard that Seagate, Toshiba and Maxtor are some of the more popular ones.

And before Moggl (or any other moderator of this board) boots me out for deviating too far from the subject at hand , I would be grateful to anybody who can provide me with this (game-related) info I mentioned in my opening message:

1. will I be able to play the other modules (eg Werewolf Island) from the ToTSC CD if I did not choose to have them installed? Is the Misc module crucial?

2. Exactly how much free hard disk space is needed to play the game? The 25++ MB I have doesn't seem to suffice.

3. Don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful to stred, slag-king (especially for taking the trouble to elaborate at such length and detail about FAT??, Win 95 et al) and the others who have responded. All of you are welcome to drop any suggestions you may have at my email address -> just click on my name! .

PS slag-king, I'm residing in SE Asia, so I don't think pricewatch.com or the other sites you've mentioned are that viable to me, what with the shipping costs and other hidden costs .

PPS Until this Fri/Sat, seeya at the board!

[stred]

First of all mir_ror the controllers are
1)scsi: too expencive dont even think about it
2)ide: i dont think u are gonna find a ide controller/hd now they are too old (imagine like searching for a 80386!)
3)eide: the most popular but is aging now.
4)uide:the newest,probably the one you will find in the market.
As for a good site in the net for these matters i suggest www.tomshardware.com and its storage guide in http://www5.tomshardware.com/storage...728/index.html