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Boot Failures

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by kcav

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Boot Failure(S)

Have two PCs. On one PC the Boot drive is full, and on the other I want to install Windows XP.

I removed the Boot drive that is full and installed it on the other PC. Then I installed the latest version of Windows 2000 on the drive, and rebooted the machine from the drive. The boot worked. Then I installed Windows XP on another HDD, and removed the drive with Windows 2000.

I reinstalled hdd with Windows 2000 to its original PC. When I booted the machine it hung-up after saying Starting Windows. I booted the other machine, and I got an error message "Boot failure from Previpus Device."

What did I do wrong?

4 replies

by thechas

What did you do wrong?

You moved a hard drive with Windows installed to different hardware!

While you can get away with that with Windows 95 and 98, Windows NT, 2000, and XP are VERY hardware specific in their setups.
Unless the motherboards are basically identical, NT and 2000 usually will not boot when moved to different hardware.
For XP, even moving to an identical motherboard WILL trigger a product activation event!

What you need to do for the W2K PC, is start over, and install W2K with the drive in the target PC.

As to PC you used to install W2K, then installed XP onto a different drive, I assume that the W2K drive was the C: drive, and XP was installed on D:

The boot files are ALWAYS installed on the C: drive.
Further, XP will be pointing to the D: drive for ALL of it's files.
To fix this problem the correct way, you need to start over again with XP too.

Chas

by kcav

Thank you for your reply.

I can not install Windows 2000 from an installation CD because the machine does not have a CD-ROM drive.

I already tried to boot off floppies by using /ox command to make 4 Installation floppies with Windows 2000 on them. After detecting hardware, loading the core and all the drivers,it requested the Insallation CD be put in the CD-ROM drive, and when it could not find the CD-ROM drive it told me to abort the operation. Then I came-up with the idea for making a boot drive by removing a hard disk drive and placing it in another machine.

The machine is connected to a Fast Ethernet LAN. How can I do a remote install?

I installed a 2-port Belkin KVM Switch to connect it to the machine where I have XP installed. The switch works great.

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