A friend had an XP box but had to keep his old Win2K box because there were applications on it where he threw out the install Cd’s, so they couldn’t be copied.
The Win2K box was making strange noises so we looked into what could be done.
The plan would be to create a dual boot hard drive on his XP box where his Win2K system would also be installed. Saving him to have to change, keyboard, mouse and monitor cables when he switched boxes.
1) Got a 40 GB hard drive.
2) Booted Win2K install CD and created 3 Partitions, 12 GB, 4GB, 24GB
Installed Win2K in partition 1 C:\ 12 GB. This is to make sure MBR and Bootsector expect a Win2K load.
3) Booted WinXP install CD and installed WinXP into partition 3 E:\ 24GB
4) Install freeware program XXCopy in WinXP
http://www.xxcopy.com/xcpydnld.htm5) Power off, replaced CD drive with hard drive from Win2K box.
6) Booted up WinXP, ran XXCopy using as source the Win2K hard drive and destination of partition 1 C:\ on current hard drive. Actually clobbering the fresh Win2K install I had done. I used this command line
XXCOPY F:\*.* C:\ /Ks/h/e/R/q/y
7) Power off, unplug Win2K hard drive, hook up CD drive.
8) Power up with WinXP install CD
XXCOPY clobbered the boot.ini created by XP install (with 2 systems) with the original boot up of Win2K from the hard drive. Not knowing what to do, I did a WinXP in place install (re-installed XP) just to get the dual boot boot.ini.
Then powered off and powered on again and select Win2K.
9) Success, Win2K starts up. Now test those precious programs. Yes they run.
Shut down, Power up and run WinXP, everything OK.
I installed Win2K on C:\ to keep the programs on the old box happy, since they would be looking for C:\
The WinXP box was from the same company as the Win2K box, so finding the new MB and hardware wasn’t hard at all for the first Win2K boot up on a different machine.
Question 1
I was wondering if there would be a way to skip the first Win2K install and WinXP reinstall.
If I could just copy the old Win2K into C:\ and then add a line in boot.ini for WinXP
multi(0)disk(0)rddisk(0)partition(3)WINDOWS=”Windows XP”noexecute=option/fastdetect
Question 2
My first attempt was to copy the registry from the old Win2K system and install it on the freshly installed Win2K system (I can easily copy over the Program Files stuff).
I used the Backup tool in Win2K, it created a backup file just fine, but also recorded the time tag of the Backup.
When I tried the Restore tool on the other hard drive, it had no record of the backup so I was unable to put the registry of the Win2K box on this new hard drive.
Ok, it’s not such a good idea for the hardware specific things in the registry but is there a way to do it for the software programs?