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Swapping Harddrives

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by ljackson.desoto

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I will try to make this short. I was running a Win2K system that stays on most of the time. I shut down just to "refresh" the system and it would not re-boot. Got stop error, blue scren, inaccessible boot device. Never recovered. Put in another HD with win2k and booted fine, but didn't have the PW to completely get in the system. Took a fresh HD and re-installed WIN2k and system booted fine. Got the old HD back from data recovery and decided to install a new motherboard and processor to upgrade before putting all the data back. Took the new HD I had just installed Win2k on and tried to put in the "new system" after installing the motherboard and processor and got a stop error, blue screen, inacessible boot device. I was told that the reason was you cannot "swap" HD's like that. The new system boots with a WIN98 drive, but not with Win2k now. Is this correct and will re-installing the o/s again get the drive working?

10 replies

by thechas

Like Windows NT, Windows 2000 and XP do not respond well to simply moving a boot drive from one system to another.

The larger the difference between the basic hardware on the motherboard, the less apt that either W2K or XP will boot when the boot drive is moved to a different system.

So, yes it is possible that the 2 systems are different enough to stop W2K from booting as installed.

Installing W2K with the drive in the target system is the way to correct the issue.

Chas

by thechas

Hello,

Got your message.

Here is a link to a web page that details a method to repair a W2K installation when moving the hard drive:

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/install/other/motherboard/win2k.htm

While one would think that since you can boot to a W98 system, you should be able to boot into W2K, there may be a hardware problem with the system.
If you have it, or can borrow some, try a different manufactures RAM in the system.

I have seen more than 1 system that will not boot into Windows with some combinations of RAM and motherboards.

For that matter, try removing all plug-in cards except your video card.
Again, some hardware combinations will work with one version of Windows and not another.

Chas

by wlbowers

The easiest way to solve this according to Microsoft is to do an inplace upgrade.

What the problem is: 2000 and XP will not reinstall the drive controllers if they change between boots.

OS Inplace Upgrade
2k Knowledge Base Article Q292175
http://tinyurl.com/5za4v

You will lose all updates.

Lee

by pc_essentials

I just wanted to add this was a 4+ year old clone with a WD 30gb IDE drive with TONS of CAD apps and designs to a brand new DELL with a Maxtor 250gb SATA. Microsoft was no help whatsoever. I found this fix on my way back from the end of the internet! Powerquest Drive Image 5 duped the drives perfectly. This fix was a life saver along with other misc tasks that was needed.

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