last night i tryed to install a new hard drive on my windows 2000 machine but expierenced problems when i tryed to do a byte by byte transfer of the information from one drive to the other. I'm hoping to avoid a totally wipe of the system resulting in a reinstall. I tyed to use the default software that came with the hard drive but it did not support the ntfs file system nor did the newer version that i tryed. It would get to 99% done and then lock up forcing me to abort it and find some other solution. is their a way to upgrade your primary hard drive with out having to reinstall everything?

Skull,

what do you mean by upgrade you primary hard drive? if you want to clone the entire contents of one drive to another, you can always mirror the drives thro disk managment in the computer manager. takes a while tho, took two hours to clone my 120gig.

Are you running professional or server?

quite frankly, for his purposes, i dont think it matters, since they are basicaly the same, ie. have all of the same system tools and ****, only difference is that server and advanced server (which im running) are built more for background processes, have better service managment and more server tools, such as RAS, IIS, Telnet, and basicly network monitor and managment tools.

What you can do is just put both your hard drives in your computer and install windows on the new one, set it as your primary and then copy over the data from the other one. That is, if i'm understanding your question correctly.

I have some programs for dos (not really dos but it runs from boot and mirrors drive) it works quite well.. if you want find me and i'll get a copy to you if i can find it.

The reason i wanted to copy my entire hard drive is i had alot of stuff installed which i didn't want to take the time to uninstall and then reinstall. I did find the awnser to my question though. I was trying to use the software that came with the hard drive (map power) but it did not support the ntfs file system so that was out of the question. I did try to use a device manager to copy the hard drive and all the admin tools but i was unable to find something that allowed me to copy. That when the trouble set in, and i found that the hard drive i was installing had a boot sector virus on it and it had infected my current install which made it impossible to boot the system. So long story short, i did end up formatting and reinstalling. But for anybody else who was wondering the awnser to this question i learned that Norton Ghost is one utility that will copy the entire partition for you. Alot of network admins use it instead of having to reinstall windows on every machien and feeding it the software, they'll do it once, and then use norton ghost to do the rest.

Skull,

I has that problem before, basically a good idea is to stick both hard drives in and set the new one to primary plus then install windows. After that copy the information over that you want to keep installed, but you need to also try and copy the registry over from the old hard drive, I hope you succeed without getting some fuc.kered msg.

Another way to do so is (I know this works Ive done it this way) boot from floppy a win98 boot floppy or something like that forget cdrom support you wont need it. Then run fdisk and make sure your new drive is set as primary and is clean formated and is assigned the drive letter that your old drive had before. Basicly in the box switch the drives around!

Then once all that is ok copy everything from the second drive eg. d: to c:

copy d: c:

then it will go, you must make sure that you boot of floppy otherwise it will give you errors when trying to copy files from the main win system32 directory.

As far as i know there is a software out there called driveimage that should do that for you though? Check it out.

I hope this helps.

ahh **** your running ntfs **** you that wont work then. get yourself some software like DriveImage that will do it.

Olosoft,

actually your quite right. For what he's trying to do it doesnt really matter. My bad.

I am curious however on what kind of machine you could possible have that takes advantage of Advanced Server in a way that cant be accomplished with good old server.

I have both as well but have never loaded advanced. If ya could, please advise on what differences you have found running advanced if any. You have that many processors running???? That much memory for the need of the OS????? Just curious is all.

I would appreciate it.