Copying WinNT 4.0 to new drive

[stevet]

And it worked!

I've been told by many people that you could not copy NT from one drive to another, but I fingered out a way without any special software. I have been using a Quantum Bigfoot 2.5 GB drive here at work for the last year or so, but it was starting to get full (besides being incredibly slow!). I acquired a 4.3 GB Maxtor that I wanted to install in place of the Bigfoot, but I didn't want to have to totally reinstall the OS and all my programs. My system is a dual-boot 98/NT4. So, here is how I did it:

- installed new hard drive on secondary controller
- partitioned and formatted it FAT16
- booted from the Bigfoot into Win98
- did the xcopy thing (xcopy c:\*.* /h/e/r/c/k d:\)
- shut down, removed Bigfoot
- moved Maxtor to primary controller
- booted to Win95 floppy
- ran fdisk and set primary partition on Maxtor active
- rebooted to WinNT install CD
- pressed "r" to repair my existing installation of NT
- repaired boot sector and startup environment

That was it. When I restarted the computer again, my dual-boot menu came up and I went right into NT - and MUCH faster now!

------------------
Steve Taylor - Service Manager
Altoplanos Information Systems, Inc.
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho USA
www.altoplanos.net

[unknown]

I think you missed the point when it comes to copying NT onto another hd. Sure, your method works, but only with fat16 partitions. How do you expect to copy NT 4 when you use their NTFS partitions? Then you'll definitely need special software like powerquest's drivecopy to do an exact duplicate.

[radio89]

so is your whole partition fat 16 on both nt and win98 im very new to nt . i cant even change the colors from 16 i have a ati all in wonder pro with tv . talk about problems
two is it possible two run win98 back to fat 32 once nt is set up on a 8.4 gig my 98 is setup on a 13 gig my nt is set up on the 8.4
now im not going to even mention the scsi burner and the scsi cd . man i got problems with all the h/w i have win98 set up perfectly no conflicts it works great but nt help please