Trying to clone Agilent 86100A hard drive to SSD

[swperk]

I have an 86100A Infiniium scope that works fine, but I am hoping to improve its performance by cloning its hard drive to an SSD. I have not been successful, so I'm looking for some advice from people who know more about this than I do!

I took the original 3.0GB hard drive and used MiniTool Partition Wizard to clone it to a 64GB PATA SSD using the default settings, which included scaling up the size of the cloned partition proportional to the increased size of the SSD. The cloning went perfectly, but when I installed the SSD and tried to boot from it, the BIOS recognized the SSD but refused to boot, and the scope just beeped incessantly. Then I decided to clone the drive to the SSD and keep the cloned partition the same size as the source drive (2.0GB). This time, the scope tried to boot up but stopped and asked me for the location of the COMMAND.COM file.

The scope is running Windows 98, and I have to admit that I'm not familiar with limitations that this OS might have regarding maximum drive capacity or any other special requirements. I've successfully cloned other drives for Agilent T&M gear, but those instruments were newer and running Windows XP or better.

One more question: is it possible to upgrade the OS on the 86100A to Windows XP?

Any and all help will be much appreciated!

Thanks,
Stan

[Per Hansson]

Try to use HDAT2 to limit the size of the drive using the "set max address" command so it matches the original drives size.
https://www.hdat2.com/

[swperk]

I solved the issue.

First, I had to set the partition size on the SSD to 2GB, which seems to be because of a Windows 98 limitation for the boot partition size. Then I did a sector-by-sector copy. Finally, I changed from using MiniTool Partition Wizard to using EaseUS ToDo Backup and its cloning function. It took several tries of various permutations and combinations before I found the proper method.

Now we all know!