Move hard drive from 1 motherboard to another using windows 2000

[York Web Design]

Hi,

I have got an old server that is having intermittent faults. Every other time I switch it on, it beeps three times and fails to boot up. Nothing shows on the screen at all.

My initial diagnosis is, the motherboard is failing. So, I am looking at changing the motherboard.

I will be taking all of the hardware that works from the old machine and put it all into another motherboard. This includes the hard drive with the installation of windows 2000 I am using.

I have noted previously that Windows 2000 and Windows 98 are not plug and play operating systems, where the chipset is concerned. This means I may have some trouble porting the installation from one motherboard to another.

Does anyone have any advice as to how I should do this.

My plan is to try and backup the installation first, with ntbackup.exe if the old machine allows me to.

Then take the hard drive and graphics card out and move them to another machine.

I am thinking booting the "new" machine in safe mode would be best.

But I have no idea how likely it is to work.

your help would be appreciated.

 

[Pointertovoid]

This is a difficult task, with W2k-Xp-2k3 much more so than with W98. By the way, Plug-and-play is a totally different concept (IRQ assignation on ISA and PCI).

If the disk host (wrongly called "controller") is the same in both machines, is works rather easily: unplug, plug, run. It's the case if the chipset is the same, or if you run your OS disk from an added disk host, for instance a Raid controller on Pci: move the host with the disk, done.

(Well, remove the video driver before, if it doesn't fit the new video card)

If not, trouble! Methods exist, their description takes a full page. Common to all is that you must deinstall any added driver for the disk host before the move, so your W2k relies on its own drivers - provided they fit both disk hosts. An other possibility is to switch to a universal host driver like UniAta
http://alter.org.ua/en/soft/win/uni_ata
provided it fits both disk hosts.

Fingers crossed!