HD w/ Win2K won't boot when seated in new desktop

[duyenoyama]

I cloned my HD from work and seated it into my desktop at home. Win2K starts to load and then just hangs (during the black & white status bar). The two computers are both from the Dell Optiplex family and I thought so long as I have a set of Win2K boot disks and the Win2K Pro CD handy, I'd be covered w/ regards to any driver issues I have between the two machines. Unfortunately, when I edit boot.ini to produce ntbtlog.txt via the /BOOTLOG switch, I can't find it anywhere. The /SOS switch is helpful, but scrolls through so I'm unable to record all of the messages during bootup.

 

[pbxman]

Cloning a hard drive is exactly that - unless the other PC is identical in hardware, the image will not match the hardware installed in the other PC, and will most likely fail to boot.
Backups differ from images in the sense that a backup is meant to be performed with a running installation of the OS. An image is meant to be a complete copy (hardware, software, and all settings) of a computer only to be reapplied back onto that same computer, or an identical other PC.

Even things like having 128MB RAM in one system, and 32MB in another identical model could fail on boot. Such is the case with your situation - your 2 PC's are not identical, so the image will always fail. There's nothing you can do about it besides install the OS separately, and perhaps restore a "backup" of your work PC's software onto the new Win2K installation of your home pc.

There are tools that will create an image of your software environment only bypassing the hardware part. You might want to look into that if you plan on doing this often.

Hope this helps. pbxman
Systems Administrator

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[VMWiseGuy]

When you create the bootlog, have you tried looking for hidden files? Something jogs my memory with looking for BOOTLOG.TXT before and it was a hidden file. Just a thought.

I've done this before - cloning a HD to another machine - and had to reinstall Win2K on the new copy for it to get all the machine specific settings (IDE controller especially). On a reinstall, you can do the REPAIR option and Win2K will figure out what needs to be done without making it too painful. After that, you will probably want to reinstall SP2 (if you have it on now) and then check out your apps to be sure they still function okay. In my case, it worked well. Good luck! JSV