Copying system to new drive - pagefile problem

A

Alex Rast

I'm trying to move my installation over to a new, higher-capacity drive. So I:

Put the new drive in as a slave drive on the same IDE channel.
Partitioned the drive using Disk Manager in the old system.
Assigned drive letters to the new partitions
Booted into a second, bare-bones Win2K installation on the old drive.
Copied over the boot partition of the main Win2K installation on the old drive
onto the corresponding partition on the new drive.
Ran Win2K install to create the MBR on the new drive (I didn't install Win2K
itself over the copied Win2K installation.

Here's the problem. The copied Win2K installation boots, but at login it claims
that I have too small of a pagefile and then unceremoniously logs me
immediately out again. Looking at previous threads, the suggestion is that this
is generally caused by not giving system all rights to the %systemroot% drive.
I therefore made very sure to assign it explicit permissions, recopied, and
tried again. Still no luck.

Meanwhile the bare-bones Win2K system on the old drive I also managed to copy
onto the new drive and it boots without problems. So there's something else not
right with the main Win2K copy. Can anyone tell me what else might be wrong?
What do I need to do to get the main copy over successfully and boot?
Reinstalling the operating system is not an option.
 
P

Pegasus \(MVP\)

Alex Rast said:
I'm trying to move my installation over to a new, higher-capacity drive. So I:

Put the new drive in as a slave drive on the same IDE channel.
Partitioned the drive using Disk Manager in the old system.
Assigned drive letters to the new partitions
Booted into a second, bare-bones Win2K installation on the old drive.
Copied over the boot partition of the main Win2K installation on the old drive
onto the corresponding partition on the new drive.
Ran Win2K install to create the MBR on the new drive (I didn't install Win2K
itself over the copied Win2K installation.

Here's the problem. The copied Win2K installation boots, but at login it claims
that I have too small of a pagefile and then unceremoniously logs me
immediately out again. Looking at previous threads, the suggestion is that this
is generally caused by not giving system all rights to the %systemroot% drive.
I therefore made very sure to assign it explicit permissions, recopied, and
tried again. Still no luck.

Meanwhile the bare-bones Win2K system on the old drive I also managed to copy
onto the new drive and it boots without problems. So there's something else not
right with the main Win2K copy. Can anyone tell me what else might be wrong?
What do I need to do to get the main copy over successfully and boot?
Reinstalling the operating system is not an option.

The cause of your problem is quite simple: When you moved
Windows to the new disk, your drive letters got jumbled up.
Windows is now running off drive E: (for example) when
it really should run off drive C:.

The cure depends on your facilities:
- Is the problem machine networked?
- Can you temporarily install the problem disk as a slave
disk in some other Win2000/XP PC?

About "reinstalling the system" not being an option: If this
is the case then you should seriously consider purchasing
an imaging product (Acronis, PQMagic) and take a snapshot
of your system. If you don't protect your investment then
you'll lose it sooner or later.
 
A

Alex Rast

at Mon, 11 Apr 2005 09:45:33 GMT in
[email protected] (Pegasus (MVP)) said:
The cause of your problem is quite simple: When you moved
Windows to the new disk, your drive letters got jumbled up.
Windows is now running off drive E: (for example) when
it really should run off drive C:.

Yes, I determined that last night. Even at the time I was assigning drive
letters I was suspicious something like that might arise. However, I
hoped Microsoft wouldn't be that stupid. It appears that they've got it
set up so that drive letters are assigned to the specific physical drive
as opposed to the device number off the bus (SCSI or IDE or whatever you
happen to have).

The way they should have set it up is so that the letter
is assigned to partition x on device number y, so that it isn't tied to a
physical drive as such. Then when you copied over to a new drive, once you
pulled out the old drive, it would occupy the device number the old drive
had had, so that the drive letter would map to the partition specified on
the old drive. In fact, I don't think *any* configuration or settings should
be tied to a specific physical instance of a piece of hardware, because then
if that piece of hardware should fail, you could run into difficulties.
That's just the most obvious shortcoming, and there are many others.
The cure depends on your facilities:

I actually did manage to fix it last night. What I did is hack the registry.
Drive letter assignments are in HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices. You just edit
the lines \DosDevices\<drive_letter>: so that their values match the
corresponding value for the drive you wantin the \??\Volume{<vol_number>}
entries. This you can do as long as you have a second barebones install
of Win2K on the drive that will boot. Or you can do it with the old drive
in place, editing the registry on the new drive. Anyway, what you do is run
RegEdt32, choose Load Hive, load the system hive on the new drive into some
key (you can call it anything you want) and then edit the MountedDevices
value entries. Then unload the hive, take out your old drive, and reboot
(or reboot into your main Win2K install if you're doing this from the barebones
install on the new drive). Then the system will boot. Silly, but whatever.
About "reinstalling the system" not being an option: If this
is the case then you should seriously consider purchasing
an imaging product (Acronis, PQMagic) and take a snapshot
of your system. If you don't protect your investment then
you'll lose it sooner or later.

Well, now that I've got the methodology I have an easy way of copying a drive.
My honest experience with drive imaging or copying software is that although
it generally works OK, it's often pretty idiosyncratic and frequently doesn't
give you full flexibility in how you set up your new drive. Often times
in addition they don't work when new drive standards come out, a frequent
occurrence it seems these days, with newer, bigger capacities. (which seems
to me like a failure of drive standardisation committees. Why can't they
realise that it's necessary to design a standard that is valid for *infinite*
drive capacity, bus width, data speed, etc...?)
 

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