How to move a Windows 2000 hard drive

[kruptof]

Originally Posted by glc More often than not, if you try to move a hard drive to a different system you will get an "innaccessible boot device" bluescreen.

Thats wierd i just moved my HDD to another system the other day because my current system did not have a burner....and i didn't get any erros...............i knew the graphics were going to be crappy because the drivers weren't installed but i did not have this error that you speak off.

[glc]

Consider yourself lucky.

[amigo]

Originally Posted by glc Okay. This procedure is not tested by me personally, but it works in theory. Put the drive into the 98 box as an additional drive and remove all partitions. Set it up with two FAT32 partitions, the second large enough for the contents of the 2000 CD plus a little breathing room. You won't need PM for this, Fdisk will do the job. Note the drive letters - I'll use X and Y here for reference, X being the first partition and Y being the second. Open a DOS prompt window. format x: /s This formats the main partition and makes it bootable. Find himem.sys and smartdrv.exe in Win98 and copy them to the root of X. edit x:\config.sys Add the following lines, save and exit. device=himem.sys dos=high edit x:\autoexec.bat Add the following line, save and exit. smartdrv Copy the 2000 CD to Y. Put the drive back in the notebook and boot it up. It should boot to a C prompt, and the second partition should be D. D: cd i386 winnt Set 2000 up on the first partition, leave it FAT32 for now, you can convert it to NTFS later if you want. You may wind up with a boot menu, if so, you can edit boot.ini to fix that. If you want, just leave the second partition there, keep it FAT32, and if you don't want to see it, hide it with PM. If you need to do a repair later, you can boot it with a USB floppy drive - use a 98 startup disk that has smartdrv on it and added to the autoexec.bat - and if the partition is unhidden, you can use the same commands to get into Setup. Good luck!

Can I do the same on a Windows NT4 OS?

[glc]

I believe so, but you cannot use FAT32 - you have to use FAT16, which has a 2 gig size limit for each partition. You will probably need Partition Magic to finish up.