Cloning a hard drive in Windows 2000?

[Jingle]

My question is ?How can I clone my present Windows 2000 hard drive to a new drive and have it work properly?? Has anyone successfully done this ? preferably without having to buy third party software? I have not been able to do this

I just bought a new hard drive and want to use it as my boot drive. I used the software furnished with the drive to partition and format the drive and copy the files from the boot partition of the old drive to the new drive ? a procedure I have done numerous times in Win 9x with no problems.

However, the new drive won?t properly boot into Windows 2000. It begins the process in normal fashion, but gets to the blue screen and says I have no page file. I discovered that booting with the old drive in the computer as well as the new drive it used the page file on the old drive and allowed the boot to complete. This allowed me to set the page file on the new drive. (Curiously, though when I boot with the new drive as the ?C? drive and the old drive as ?D?, Windows reversed the designations and booted from the old drive ? yes, the BIOS was set properly.)

After setting the page file in the new drive, removing the old drive and rebooting, it reaches the message that say it?s loading user settings and then shuts down ? sort of. It then picks up at the point where the message says it?s restoring the network (I have none) and repeats, endlessly.

I have also tried a few other schemes that always work in Windows 9x with no success. Any success stories are welcome.

Jingles

 

[Boozy43]

hmm...well thats strange.
is win2k your only OS?...and is the drive your trying to boot up win2k on the primary drive or partition?
i know if you have win98 on primary and win2k on logical and go and delete the win98 partition/drive win2k wont boot cause there is a few files it will place on the primary needed to boot.

as far as cloning goes, i would suggest giving Ghost 6.5 2001 a try...it's about as good and simple as can be for that particular task. [IMO].

 

[StuckMojo]

i went through this many times. the only really safe way to do it is to copy the whole drive over, then reinstall overtop of it.

sometimes you can get away with copying everything over and then REMOVING the old C drive, then booting. but if you put the old C back in, it will screw it all up. you have to format it first
(be aware that is NOT guarenteed to work!)

of course, if you're running server, you can just mirror the drive, then break the mirror and it will be fine. but you cant to that with pro

[edit]
i suppose i should say why...NT writes a signature on the drive, so even if you move it and change the bios settings, it still knows which drive C was and trys to use it as the system partition
this has both good and bad points...you hit one of the bad ones

 

[Merlin]

You need to get norton GHOST. It does exactly what you want. I think there may be a trial version for download, or, if you don't want to buy only ghost, it comes as a part of norton systemworks 2001, which does support win2k

 

[dave8311]

The version of Ghost, that fits on a floppy, works for me.

However, I can't keep the second drive hooked up, or the swap file will move from C: to D:

All I use the second drive for is "backups", so after I do a full drive copy to the second drive, I disable it before re-booting, and the swap file stays put.

I have found the best way for me to disable the second drive, is to use one of those "slide out" tray's, with a key lock. The key enables/disables the drive.

Good Luck.

 

[radiocore]

could it have something to do w/ fat32/ntsf(or whatever win2k uses)

 

[Agamar]

Before you clone, you need to make your swap file "0". Go into control panel, and make the swap file min 0 and max 0, reboot, then shut down and you should be able to clone just fine. I use imagecast to do this all the time.

 

[Spiff]

Win2k has a utility called sysprep that allows you to create images. use that in conjunction with an unattended install. however, this does require use of AD and a source server for the image