mthaler

DOS, Of course Windows 98 could not really be considered a business OS, but I have done many upgrades to Windows 2000 from Win98. The deal is that re-installing applications can take several hours, and my time is valuable. I was hoping that there was some hack to fix this, but I suppose clean install is the only option. I really dislike Windows ME in a severe way. Thanks

I seem to go through this every 9 months or so, and I want to try and do this a little smoother this time. I am about to upgrade from my Intel 815 mb to an Asus AV266. I am running Win2k attached to a Win2k network. Problems I seem to always run into: 1) The hard drive controller is now set to Intel 82801BA Ultra ATA controller. I know the new motherboard uses the ALi ® MAGiK1 M1647 Chipset, and I just can't wait for the old Blue screen saying it can't access my hard drive. 2) When I get screwed up by problem 1, I always end up re-installing Win2K again. This ineveitably messes up my profile. I know that I can save my cookies and bookmarks, and move my documents, but it is a real pain for the mail rules etc and several programs typically need re-installing. Is there some kind of guide to doing this without so much pain? I know that I can do this quite easily in Win98, but not so Win2K. Any "how to" guides on this? Any backup and restore of profiles after hardware upgrades utilities?

Thank you Igor, That sysprep sounds like a "real" suggestion that might help. I will give that one a try.

My experience is that Safe Mode does not help with disk drivers. Since they load before ANYTHING, if they are wrong, you are out of luck.

Well, neither Ghost nor backup are really interesting options. For one thing, my C: drive is 40 GB and mostly full. Sure, I will do backups but the point is to not spend 10 hours backing up and restoring. What I am looking for here is some REAL way to deal with hardware changes on Windows 2000. I know for a fact that switching hard drive controllers is a great way to not boot. On the other hand, Win2K can survive a video card switch no problem. Come on people, there must be a better way.

I have a network I help adminster which has one user whose profile has been corrupted twice in the last month. The machine seems stable and I am baffled as to what the cause of the problem is. I have two questions. 1) How to recover quickly from this problem. 2) How to diagnose the cause of this problem. Last time it happened, I ended up deleting the corrupt NTUSER.DAT and copying folders from the documents & settings to recreate things for the user. It was time consuming and a royal pain. Will the Emergency Repair disc fix most of this? Naturally, I did not have one last time If there is a pointer to a FAQ that deals with this issue I would greatly appreciate it. I looked in the MS Support database with keywords Windows 2000 Corrupt profile and it did not offer much help. Thanks

Windows 2000 server is set with Active directory in pure (non-mixed) mode. This is a small network with less than 10 users. There is only one 16 port 10/100 switch, not a lot of traffic. When logging on with Windows 2000 Pro SP1, the workstations take a really long time during the "Loading Personal Settings" part. Is there a way to speed this up?

The other reason I really want DHCP is I work on repairs off this network, and need to plug random computers into the LAN and get internet access without a whole lot of setup and reboot issues. With DHCP, most machines just boot with internet access immediately and I can download patches, virus defs etc. A brand new Win98se install can download up to 50+mb from the Windows Update web site. Wouldn't want to do that with a modem, so the DSL works out very nice. Win2K is a little lighter on the patches, but either way, any machine I work on typically needs the access for a little while. Thanks to all for your help. I must say it did NOT seem like an intuitive solution, because it appeared to me that there was a hangup on the profile, and pinging the server seemed instantaneous. Internet access was fine for all machines, and browsing the network seemed OK as well. Sigh. So much for intuition...

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!! I examined the whole server deal and realized that the DSL router was doing DHCP instead of the server. So, I disabled the DHCP on the router, enabled it and configured it on the server including specifying the Server as the first of threee DNS servers (the other two being the ISP's DNS servers) and I added the DHCP options that point to the server's WINS address. VOILA, the machine now opens in about 5 seconds. Much appreciated.

clutch, The profiles are definately set to local, but I have noticed that the drive light is rarely blinking and the NIC is blinking like crazy. I also have two machines I work on, each with a seperate login, and the both take this really long time. The second machine is an Athlon 1.1Ghz with an Intel Nic. Why would a profile take so long to load? How much security policy data could move over the network. We are talking over a minute while the message on the screen says "Loading your persoal settings ..." Both these machines are 5 feet away from the server, and all are plugged into a 10/100 switch. The server is a mere 400mhz Pentium but it has 256Mb RAM and is doing very little actual work. Just running a blank screen saver, serving files and printing.

A switch will let you plug the modem in the other computers will esentially be "on the internet" directly. If you use a router, the Cable Modem or DSL comes in at its IP address and through NAT (Network Address Translation) the IP trafic is routed to the workstations on a local subnet like 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x which are IP subnets that don't exist on the internet. This provides at least a minimal amount of firewall which should prevent your machines from some hacker activity. Some cable companies do not really support the use of routers howerver, and there can be some work getting it set up. Most DSL works great with a router.

We have one of those routers here at my house and my wife's computer running Win2K kept getting that message. She was also the longest run from the router. At any rate, I updated her NIC to a different brand (SMC, cheap but good) and the problem went away. Also you might want to upgrade the flash ROM on the router.

I have looked at all the suggestions and am convinced that we are looking in the wrong place. I am pretty sure it has to do with loading profiles and it takes FOREVER (well, over a minute). The machines connect to the server instantly, but the LOADING PERSONAL SETTINGS sits for an incredibly long period of time. Is there a setting on the server or workstation that can affect the speed this happens?

Pardon my ignorance, but which cache are you talking about, and how do I clear it out? Are we talking about the cache on the server or the workstation that is slow logging in? Is there a way of telling it NOT to store massive amounts of data on the server that needs to be compared and downloaded each time? Thanks

Pings are instantaneous. Pinging sue [10.10.10.103] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 10.10.10.103: bytes=32 time<10ms TTL=128 Reply from 10.10.10.103: bytes=32 time<10ms TTL=128 Reply from 10.10.10.103: bytes=32 time<10ms TTL=128 Reply from 10.10.10.103: bytes=32 time<10ms TTL=128 Ping statistics for 10.10.10.103: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms Don't think that is the problem.

I know there is a registry setting for running things: HKEY_LocalMachine\software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run where you could add an entry.

I have found that IDE RAID is not all it cracked up to be speedwise. It can show some improvement for some operations, but I often see speed with a single drive doing better. I would recommend a visit to the forum on www.storagereview.com where IDE vs SCSI and raid performance are really studied and discussed well. The bottom line is if you want just blazing hard disk speed, you can't beat a 15K/rpm SCSI hard drive :-)

I am pretty experienced with both NT4 & Win2K but I have a problem I don't know how to handle. The situation is moving a user from NT4 to Win2K. I did NOT want to run an upgrade, because the machine was unstable enough that it seemed like it would be better to do a fresh install and just move data over. So... what we did was REMOVE the original NT4 hard drive, do a fresh install to a second hard drive. So far all goes VERY well, clean, no glitches. Ok then we install the old hard drive as the slave on the IDE chain and things go south quickly. The machine reboots, recognizes the second hard drive and says it needs to reboot. On Reboot, we have the OLD NT4 hard drive assigned to DRIVE C and many things are now mapped in a screwed up way. All I wanted to do was grab some files off the old hard drive so I copied them to the new hard drive and removed the old drive but when I rebooted things were even weirder. When I booted it said the swap file was not there and I should fix it, but each time I CTRL-ALT-DEL'd in to do it, it just returned me to the login prompt and told me the same message (loop). I finally ended up doing a repair install that got me going again, but this seemed like a painful experience I would like to avoid in the future. Any enlightenment would be greatly appreciated.

The second drive was set to the slave on the first IDE chain. It was originally set to the C: drive while running NT4.0