Moving old hard drive to a new computer

[Djebz]

Hey all you experts

I really need a word of advice here... I am currently trying to
migrate a hard drive from an old computer to a freshly built one.
There are some complications though that I would like some opinions
on:

1) The old computer has a dual boot system with windows 95 and windows
2000. Windows 95 is controlled though by AutoCad 12 (a drawing program
for building designing, runs in DOS). That means that I can't enter
windows 95 at all because the program opens up before you get to the
desktop screen. When you exit the program the computer shuts down. My
question here is: Will I be able to migrate this dual boot system to a
new hard drive and plug it into the new computer, and if I can, what
program or method can you recommend? I can enter and fully control the
windows 2000 part of the system. Will I need the operating system CD's
for the operation?

2) When the migration has been completed, my friend would like to make
a triple boot system adding windows vista. Will it be possible to do
this on such an old dual boot system?

Thanks in advance

Best regards
Djebz

 

[Calab]

Hey all you experts

I really need a word of advice here... I am currently trying to
migrate a hard drive from an old computer to a freshly built one.

If you move the OS drive to a new PC, there is a VERY good chance that it
will NOT work.

Device drivers installed for the mainboard chipset, etc. will not match.

 

[Djebz]

If you move the OS drive to a new PC, there is a VERY good chance that it
will NOT work.

Device drivers installed for the mainboard chipset, etc. will not match.

Will it be possible that it will work if the new chipset drivers are
installed on the old hard drive before I transfer it? Or will it be
possible to replace the drivers after the transfer?

And thanks for you trying to help me out ^^

 

[Strobe]

Will it be possible that it will work if the new chipset drivers are
installed on the old hard drive before I transfer it? Or will it be
possible to replace the drivers after the transfer?

It's almost impossible to change the drivers while still connected to the old
MB; the new drivers will conflict with the old ones that you still need.

The method I've used is to connect the old drive to the new MB, then do the
first boot from the WIN CD and do a repair intall of Windows, adding from the CD
that came with your MB.
This *should* install all the needed drivers, yet preserve all your other stuff.
(It worked for me.)
Apologies if you don't use Windows!

 

[kony]

Hey all you experts

I really need a word of advice here... I am currently trying to
migrate a hard drive from an old computer to a freshly built one.
There are some complications though that I would like some opinions
on:

1) The old computer has a dual boot system with windows 95 and windows
2000. Windows 95 is controlled though by AutoCad 12 (a drawing program
for building designing, runs in DOS). That means that I can't enter
windows 95 at all because the program opens up before you get to the
desktop screen. When you exit the program the computer shuts down.

I suggest you copy off the win95 system.ini file, making a
backup of it because Autocad is probably running as the
shell, meaning all you'd need to temporarily do is edit the
system.ini file (keeping a backup so you know how it was) so
it then points to explorer.exe. Elaboration of this on the
following page under the Resolution heading (ignore that
it's for Tabworks instead of AutoCad).
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q132805/

After you get the old system booting to a normal Win95
explorer shell, you'll have a chance at plug-n-playing the
new hardware once the drive is moved, BUT the new hardware
would have to have win95 drivers for all the features you
need. Frankly, it may be time to choose a newer version of
autocad, it may be expensive but if you have gotten this
many years out of it, you will probably also gain a lot in
more advanced memory usage, multicore support, etc, moving
to a newer version which improves performance quite a bit.

Anyway, so far as win95 goes after you have the old system
booting all the way to windows, uninstall any drivers in
add/remove programs (that show up there). Don't worry about
any other drivers in Device Manager, Windows will ignore
them on the new system. When Win95 boots on the new system
it will replug-n-play everything, in theory, prompting for
drivers and you'd just cancel and later disable anything you
don't have a win95 driver for. Finally in Device Manager
you'd see some duplicate entries where one has a problem,
and you'd delete both entries for each such item then reboot
a couple more times.

When Win95 is finally running on the new system, if you only
want the autocad shell then manually edit that line back
into the possibly-now--different system.ini file, not
replacing the whole system.ini file with the old one.
Frankly since a new system should boot win95 really fast,
I'd just set autocad to autorun at boot-time instead of
replacing the explorer shell, but whichever should work once
win95 is finished plugging n playing. Biggest issue is
researching ahead of time if you have enough drivers for
win95 on the new system to get done what you need to, for
example a USB or network printer driver isn't likely to
exist, as well as many video drivers. It could require
adding some old legacy hardware to the new system to get
video support, like a PCI video card.

My
question here is: Will I be able to migrate this dual boot system to a
new hard drive and plug it into the new computer, and if I can, what
program or method can you recommend? I can enter and fully control the
windows 2000 part of the system. Will I need the operating system CD's
for the operation?

Yes you may need OS CDs. For win2k, Google search for
something similar to:
Win2k moving new system hard drive

You might find pages like this:
http://www.mostlycreativeworkshop.com/Article11.html

Basically with win2k the goal is getting the system to boot
far enough that it can do like Win95 does and plug-n-play
the rest of the hardware. The key thing tends to be that it
can either default to a generic MS IDE driver, or already
has the driver for a specific HDD controller in the new
system. Basically you'd want to make a backup of the
existing OS partitions before moving the drive to the new
system so no matter what happens you haven't made
unrecoverable changes yet.

2) When the migration has been completed, my friend would like to make
a triple boot system adding windows vista. Will it be possible to do
this on such an old dual boot system?

Thanks in advance

Best regards
Djebz

Yes it's possible to later add vista. Do it after you've
already gotten the old OS installations running on the new
system, not trying to install Vista to the old system.