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Moving Hard Drives

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by mgregory

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I would like to move the hard drives on a Win2k machine to another machine. The last time I did this the system told me that because a new controller had been found, I would have to reinstall win2k. I've done this many times with other versions of windows, during motherboard upgrades, and never had a proplem. Am I missing something here??? .. This should be a simple upgrade, and I don't think I should have to do a complete reinstall.

7 replies

by ann777

Windows 2000 is very much aware of the hardware that it should find on boot. Moving a hdd and using it as a boot device with different hardware, will cause this need for a re-install. The hardware HAS changed, Win2000 needs to adjust itself for clock speed (the system date/time is based on this syncing up) and other hardware settings are contained in the registry.

A complete reinstall is advisable when changing major components such as a systemboard.

by mgregory

It seems to me there should be another way of doing this, besides a complete reinstall.

by choppit

I suspect that if this is possible at all it will be easier with FAT32 than NTFS. Certainly I've has no luck doing this with NTFS volumes. It may be worth converting the drive to FAT32 before swapping.

by thechas

Here is a link to a Microsoft article on how to move W2K to new hardware.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q249694

Remove any spaces from the pasted link.

I have not moved any W2K or XP installs as yet. For W9X, I usually start by removing ALL hardware from device manager before the last shutdown of the old system.
That way, Windows does not attempt to load drivers for hardware that is not there.

Chas

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