Moving to a larger Hardisk

[Andersony 0]

In Win9x if I wanted to quickly move to a larger hardisk: I could just boot under the old drive to Win 9x. Open an MS DOS prompt and xcopy x:\*.* z: /h /e /r /c /k /y. Unhook the old drive, boot to a floppy, set the new drive as Active. And booooom ! I'm off and running with a larger drive.

 

NT4 pissed me off with its 4GB limit ... so I hardly messed with it.

 

2000 is awesome, but I'm having trouble moving all my Win2k info to a larger drive. I've messed with the dynamic partitions, thinking that I could mirror it, break the mirror and then resize the dynamic boot partition to take up the rest of the space of the new drive ... but it wont allow the primary "dynamic" partition to be resized.

 

What R U doing?

 

-Brett

[herb 0]

I searched the microsoft knowledge base on this topic. They said, it is not supported to transfer the OS from one harddisk to another.

Maybe it can be done with a program for "cloning" harddisks? Didn't make a research on this.

 

Reinstalling sucks,

herb

[nova 0]

While you can boot from dynamic disks, you can not resize, mirror or RAID your boot partition, even if it's dynamic. This is because Win2k first needs to load the drivers to support these special features.

 

I'd do it this way: if you have a second PC with NT4 (with SP4 (I thinkg) or later installed, else it doesn't support the new NTFS5 of Win2k) or Win2k installed, then just put both drives (old and new one) into that PC and simply copy all the files over.

 

Otherwise, I suggest making an additional Win2k installation on your old HD, and then using THAT one to copy over all the files.

 

The reason you can't copy all the files while the Win2k installation being in question is running, is that some files (registry, pagefile, and some other things) are inaccessible. That's different from what Win9x behaves like (except the pagefile).

 

nova.