Disk cloning woes

[tbalazs]

Old dual boot computer: Disk(0) has primary partition c: (FAT32/Win95) and logical partition f: (NTFS/Win2K). Disk(1) has primary partition d: (NTFS). CD-RW is e: and DVD-ROM is g:

4 questions:

When I copy boot.ini ntldr and ntdetect to a new hard disk FAT32 partition at the start of the disk and clone the old NTFS installation, the system will load the cloned Win2K if it's booting from the old FAT32 partition but not from the one on the new disk. Will doing fdisk/mbr on the new disk sort this out or will it trash the new installation?

When I use Partition Magic to try to clone the old Win95 installation I get an error that files are open and the clone process aborts. Assuming I need to clone c: is there any way round this?

Can I copy some minimal files to the new (small) FAT32 partition so as not to have to have the entire Win95 installation there?

And finally, is there any way of cloning/copying old f:Win2k to new c:Win2k and automatically changing all the f: references to c: references?

Thanks for any help....I do realise that a clean Win2K install might be a lot easier than all of this!

Tony.

 

[wolluf]

1. You need to run fixboot x: from recovery console, where x: is the drive letter of the new disk partition as seen from recovery console to make it bootable.

2. Where are you running PM from? If running from 2k - does 2k have any system files on the 95 partition (eg, pagefile). If from 95 - try from 2k (or what about the PM dos/rescue disk version).

3. Depends what you mean by minimal. You can 'move' parts of installation (eg, \Program files folder, swapfile) to other partitions after 95 installed.

4. You can clone win2k - BUT it will retain its system drive letter (F. There is a method for changing this - but its not recommended (because it doesn't change everything associated - usually lots of registry entries at least). So, yes - recommend new clean install if you want it on C: (

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q223188

if you're interested).