Here's the short answer: download Seagate DiscWizard. It's free.
It is normally installed to C DRIVE.
Windows 98
YES
Use Acronis.
Whether or not the hard drive has Windows installed on it is irrelevant to the actual process of replacing the drive. if you want to preserve the current Windows installation, you'll need to use hard drive imaging software to copy the data from the old drive. Otherwise, you can simply replace the drive and reinstall Windows as you would normally.
Yes. The Windows Backup and Restore Utility gives you the option to make a duplicate copy of all the data on your hard drive if you wish.
Copying a DVD to a hard drive is not complicated. Just insert the disc in the DVD drive, open windows explorer and either do copy and paste or the drag and drop method.
You can install Windows 7 from optical drive (CD, DVD), hard drive (a local copy), network or USB device.
You just copy your data to the hard drive somehow. It is just a matter of finding out how the system identifies the hard drive and accessing that device.For instance, in MS-DOS, if you wanted to copy something to the hard drive you could issue a command such as:COPY A:\*.* C:\That would copy the entire contents of the root directory of the floppy in drive A: to the root directory of the hard drive identified as drive C:.On Windows, if you have something on a CD in drive E: that you want to copy to drive C:, you could just drag and drop it. Just open up the 2 windows that you want to copy between, make the selections on the source folder, and drag them to the window of the destination folder.
When Windows won't boot because of changes made to the registry, you can copy the correct registry files back onto the hard drive.
Backup and restore
Yes, you can if you have a copy of the CD saved somewhere on your hard drive.