WINDOWS

Before Windows 95, some computer manufacturers used hardware disk copying machines to copy software. This had the disadvantages of copying not just the used data on the disk, but also unused sectors, as the hardware used was not aware of the structures on the disks. A larger hard disk could not be copied to a smaller one, and copying a smaller one to a larger left the remaining space on the new disk unused. The two disks required identical geometries. Other manufacturers and companies partitioned and formatted disks manually, then used file copy utilities or archiving utilities, such as tar or zip to copy files. It is not sufficient simply to copy all files from one disk to another, because there are special boot files or boot tracks which must be specifically placed for an operating system to run, so additional manual steps were required. Windows 95 compounded the problems because it was larger than earlier popular operating systems, and thus took more time to install. The long..