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Boot Win 2000 on 2 machines using 1 HD

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I have a dual installation (win 2000 server and win 98) on a machine. Over the week end, I pulled out the hard drive from this machine and tried to install it on another machine that has different mother board and processor. When I boot the machineup, win 98 came up without any problems, but I got a blue screen when I tried to boot the machine up with win 2000.
Have anyone done this before? Appreciate any comments or suggestions in order to make this installation to work.

Thank you in advance for your help,

Thai

13 replies

by rwscc

Create another partition on the hard drive. Install Win2k Svr into the new partition will running in the second machine. In other words, you cannot move a Win2k boot drive between two significantly different machines. You can triple boot to make this work, or you can replace the motherboard & CPU in the second machine to closely match the original. If they match fairly close you can create separate hardware profiles to optimize the OS for each of the machines.

by aekland

2k is not as picky as nt4 but it still uses a hal which makes it more stable but less movable than 98. If this is a permanent move you might try disabling some of the services or a repair installation of 2k so the correct drivers are loaded. I have not done much recovery testing in 2k yet to have a complete solution.

by windows2000-mcp

Windows 2000 does not like to be moved. The OS is very specific to hardware, and with complying with the HCL. If the computer will reboot in the new machine, insert the cd-rom and start the repair console if possible, choose repair drive. If you cannot do that then you will need to edit the system registry and remove the old system/hardware configuration, then restart and let plug and play re-detect the new hardware. Make sure P&P is enabled in setup prior to doing this.
The last recourse is to run "makeboot" (create set of 4 disks for install)from the I386 folder on the cd-rom and do a re-install.

by gnet158

I agree with the above post. It will not work if you just take the hard drive from one machine and place it into completly different machine. I'm supprised that Win 98 didn't give you more of a problem.

by james_randy

If you are still tackling this problem, perhaps you should consider calling your local super-hero.

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