moving a Windows 2000 installation to a new PC?

I ran a search on the forums and didn't see this having already been addressed, so here goes.

I just got a new barebones system, simply a case with an ECS K7S5A with an AMD XP 2100+ processor plus heatsink, fan, power supply and such. The plan was to move all the hardware from my old system (a p3 600) into the new one and hopefully have it work with minimal problems.

Well, nothing ever goes right.

I put in my 40gb and 20gb HDs (I doubt the brand matters as they function just fine), my GeForce 4 MX440, my GeForce 2 MX200 (I use dual monitors), my Logitech cordless optical mouse and keyboard, my Wacom Penpartner 4x5 serial tablet, my SB Live, my generic CD burner (40x12x24 or some such) and my generic DVD-ROM. It all booted fine at first, until W2K started to initialize and it gave me an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error.

I looked around on the Microsoft.com knowledge base and found very little actual useful information. Their solutions, IIRC, were to 1) make the new system's hardware identical to my old one in every detail (obviously not an option), 2) reformat (an incredibly, horribly painful option as I have about 30gb of data that I would need to back up and I need the system up and working ASAP for work purposes), or 3) give up.

I did some other searching and found a link to an article on the knowledge base that told me EXACTLY how to transfer an existing W2K installation to a different computer, but, naturally, it seems that that's the one article that 404s. Of course. That would be way too easy.

Right now I'm trying to decide what to do, and I definitely need some advice on how to get all this working. I''ve attempted both to repair and to install another copy of W2K into a different directory but the W2K installation locked my system both times. :\

Any advice anyone can give me on how to get this up and running (not including upgrading to XP... hehe) will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

- Jon Jones [shine@planetquake.com]

[edit] Forgot to mention that the 20gb HD is the master and the 40gb HD is the slave, and the 20gb one is an NTFS volume. [/edit]

 

Inaccessible boot device means that it cant find the hard disk once its swapped over the load control to Windows from the pseudo DOS that is running it so far

Is your new m/board an ATA100 board, if so you will need specific drivers for the controller ?

Specs of the original board will be useful to see whats different

Post back and we'll continue


Happy Holidays !

 

Thank you for replying!

Yes, I looked up the information and it is indeed an ATA100 board.

As for my old board, it's an Intel VC820. The most information I could find on it on the Intel website was here:

http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/vc820/prod_over.htm

I wasn't sure which information was pertinent to copy\paste here, and it's all in tables anyway, so it would be pretty messy to put in here.

I noticed too late that the new motherboard came with a disc that included PC-Cillin, 'Language Genius', 'Recovery Genius' and CDGhost... that's all it says is on there, but would be reasonable to assume that the right thing to do would have been to install that on my old system before moving the HD over?

Last night I thought about it some more and decided just to buy a new Maxtor 80gb HD and install W2K freshly on that. I'm working with that right now but I think my original question still stands (for the most part) as I'd prefer to have all my old settings from my old copy of W2K intact. Would the procedure for that be roughly the same as what I asked originally, or is that a whole new can of worms?

 

Look at this thread -->

http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11272


It really works to use the 'second repair' option from the Win2k CD.

Top Dog