Windows 2000, drive letters, and swear words

[Uraniun235]

Tonight I moved my Windows 2000 installation from an old 20GB hard drive to a newer, faster 120GB hard drive. I have to admit that going into this, I was half-expecting Windows to throw up a Blue Screen of Death when I booted from the newer drive because it's Windows like that.

I was quite elated to see it make it through the initial boot process, but just after it loaded my personal settings, it threw up an error about the paging file being too small and telling me how to fix that.

Okay, that's easy enough. Hit 'OK'... and it tosses me back to the login screen. Log in... paging file error... logged back out. Huh. Let's try that in safe mode... huh. Not working there either.

A little frantic Googling (I wasn't going back to that slow 20 gig and I really don't feel like reinstalling Windows right now) finds me this solution: FDISK /MBR.

After applying this (well, as I didn't have a floppy drive handy, fortunately the Ultimate Boot CD had a utility whose "Rebuild MBR" function worked just as well) Windows booted just fine.

So, if you ever find yourself moving a Windows install to another hard drive, you might keep this in mind. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to fix a good nuclear warhead of mine up with a date... and her name is Redmond...

Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, everything that's wonderful is what I fell when we're together...

[Netko]

Or you can use Norton Ghost's copy drive function which has an option for exactly that situation and works flawlessly (saved me 2 reinstalls on my home computer alone - both times the original drives were failing, ghost transfered the data without problems to the new drives).

You just plug in the new drive, tell ghost to transfer to the unformated space, then power down and plug the new drive into the original drives spot (or if you know what you are doing you have other options at this point as I'm sure most are aware).

[Uraniun235]

Ha. Ha ha.

I used Norton Ghost. I copied a partition onto a drive which had already been partitioned because I neither need nor want a 120GB system partition. And, if you check the link I posted, it notes that other people who have used Ghost with 2000 have run into the same problem.

No, believe me, I'm quite familiar with Ghost... you have to be, in a network environment where six people are responsible for maintaining over a thousand computers.

[Netko]

Erm, why do you think Ghost can't do a partition which is only as large as the original drive? Thats what I did. Like you, I don't really need a 160 gig sys partition.

About Ghost and 2000. It's quite possible you are right. To be honest, I only ever supported one 2000 installation and in that case I've never had to do anything more complex then installing some drivers and anti-spyware stuff (everyone else is/was either something out of the 9x line or XP), and I've only used Ghost on XP installs where it worked flawlessly. As such, I haven't really ever needed to research 2000's compatibility with various utilities.

I was posting this more in the intrest of home users who might be somewhat intimidated by the command line / recovery console as a user-friendly solution (unfortunatly, like all such cases, its user friendly until the point that something goes wrong).

For the record, I've used that command before (actualy, the xp eqivalent I think) to fix my own computer when my system hard drive started failing once and I didn't have the money to replace it nor the desire to do a reinstall.

[Uraniun235]

The only version I had handy was some stupid home version of Ghost which didn't offer much in the way of options, and by default expanded the partition being copied to take up the entire target partition size. Doing a drive copy probably would have left me with a 120GB partition.

The lesson here is that I should have thought ahead and borrowed a Ghost boot disk from work the day before ... the Corporate version is far, far superior to the home edition.