M$ question [OFF TOPIC]

[jdow]

From: "Daniel B. Thurman" <dant at cdkkt.com>

> 
> Sorry Folks,
> 
> I know this is a fedora group (I have fedora systems too) and
> I hope some of you are tolerant of *gasp* windoes.
> 
> I am desperate so I need to ask if anyone had any experience
> in trying to create/copy the entire M$ windows OS (win2k pro) from
> a main (old) drive to a new (bigger) drive successfully?  I am trying
> to get off of an old drive, transfer the contents of the old to a newer
> drive and remove the old drive.  I cannot get windows to boot off the
> new drive.
> 
> Here is what I tried to do:
> 
> 1) Use Maxtor's disk utility:
> 
>   a) Created 3 partitions; 36GB, 50GB, 50GB (from a 200GB HD) and
>       was forced to keep total # of space used to <= 137GB due to
>       the fact my old system does not support it (BIOS and MS 2000Pro)
> 
>   b) Used partition to partition copy
> 
>   Results: booting on the new drive worked however had a problem with
>   missing pagefile.sys - and the fact that explorer will not run no matter
>   what user you log in as.  Followed everything to restore pagefile.sys
>   but does not solve problem with user login (refuses to bring up the
>   user's profile / run explorer - but otherwise allows login to work but
>   limited context)

Windows does not work this way. Important items must be in the right
place on the disk or it just isn't going to work. The disk serial number
is also remembered in the registry. SO it goes looking for specific data
on specific drives and it is not there.

> 2) Used Norton's ghost 2002
> 
>    This works well however ghost does not recogize specific partition
>    pre-created on the destination drive and wants to claim the whole
>    drive.  I was not given any choice to choose the specific destination
>    partition desired and it wants a NEW parition EVERY TIME.

Aside from Norton being as nasty a piece of malware as what it tries to
prevent ghost is doing it the right way if you want it to work.

> 3) Used M$'s own backup/restore program (lite version of Backup Exec)
>    and it pretty much useless while you are running in windows as most
>    critical files are NOT backed up successfully due to open files. A restore
>    does not create a full and perfect copy of the drive being backed up.
>    Pretty useless so it seems.

You may need to perform a "dd" operation on the entire disk. But I am not
sure what Windows' reaction to the mismatch between the physical disk and
the boot sector data. It's worth a try. The "dd" copy of the entire disk
will preserve the disk serial number.

{^_^}