Transfering Windows 2000 to another drive

This is nice and convoluted-- yay to Microsoft.

Pop in the new hd.

Partition it to have partitions of equal or greater size than the current one.

Open regedit, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/system/MountedDevices

If you had the partitions C: and D:, the new ones will be E: and F:. At the bottom of the list in MountedDevices, you will see these drives. Swap them.

Launch Ghost interactively.

Copy each old partition to the new drive.

Turn the machine off.

Disconnect the old drive.

Boot, and hopefully it will all work.


This sequence should skip all the madness I went through with the paging file being on the wrong disk (if you copy C: to E:, windows will know that the new partition is E:, but will look for a page file on C:, which isn't present if you have removed the old drive). Another solution to this problem is to reboot from a win98 floppy and do fdisk /mbr, but I dont have a floppy drive or a win98 boot disk. I suppose ideally you could clone the entire drive, but I had already installed linux on the new drive.