Problem cloning dual boot W2K Pro installation

[UberNuggets]

System A is a dual boot box with Win98SE and W2K Pro, both OS's are installed on the same drive on 2 seperate partitions using FAT32. Both partitions were imaged using Ghost. A new drive on system B was partitioned into 2 drives using FAT32 but different partition sizes (bigger than the original partitions from system A).

System B (with images from system A loaded) boots into Win98 no problem. W2K is a different story. It gets to the initial boot screen (black with white progress indicator bar at bottom) and then reboots.

Any ideas on what I should tinker with to get this to boot into W2K?? Yes, I know the OS will most likely not be stable but that's ok. I just need to be able to boot it and log in to W2K and fiddle with a couple things. Took a look at boot.ini to see if that was the problem. W2K points to partition 2 which is as it should me if I am not mistaken. Is this a drive letter problem? The partitions were created using Partition Magic from the original W2K install on system B (when I want to boot into my cloned system I simply disconnect the hard drive with my regular OS, the cloned system is on a different drive on the 2nd IDE channel).

 

[Snickle]

It may be that Win2K Pro doesn't like being on the Secondary IDE channel. System A and System B implies 2 different computers, Win2K prefers being installed on the computer it will run on, changing hardware makes it quite mad.

 

[UberNuggets]

It's possible but I doubt it. Just the other day I was working on a system which had the OS installed on a mirrored RAID. Removed 1 of the drives from the array, disconnected the 2nd drive, installed the first drive in a regular non-RAID IDE connector and windows 2k pro booted up just fine. All the same i will try your suggestion because I am out of ideas at this point in time.

 

[jeremybarker]

I've seen this before using ghost, continuos reboot loop. With system B, is the system board on the latest bios? Try taking out all additional hardware out of system B, might not be compatible with windows 2000. Compatibility issues are the only thing I can think of if windows 98 boots w/ no problem. Try using ghost to create an entire disk image of system a instead of separating the image into partitions.

 

[wolluf]

If you press F8 during 2k boot (to get menu) - will it let you & if so will it load in safe mode? Have you tried loading the 2k's recovery console (boot from install CD, choose repair then recovery console - you'll need admin password) & running fixboot command on relevant drive. You can also use diskpart to see what partitions/drive letters win2k thinks are there.

 

[UberNuggets]

Thanks to those who posted suggestions, your insight is appreciated! I finally figured this out last night. I booted to the W2K Pro CD and proceeded as though it were a new installation. After the screen with the licensing agreement the setup program searches for existing W2K installations and found mine. I then chose the R option for repair. Setup copied some files to the hard drive, then rebooted the machine. Boom, it worked! It's not pretty (a lot of the application software would need to be reinstalled) but it suited my purposes. All user accounts remain intact.