To copy a Windows 2000 partition/whole drive to another drive with the intent of removing the original drive and booting directly from the new drive:
1) Install the new drive. reboot and detect the new drive in BIOS (some BIOS do this automatically at boot up)
Note: This assumes the new drive is a blank drive with no partitions on it.
2) Reboot on the Copy Commander bootable CD or our other partitioning products and enter Manual Partitioning
3) Verify that both drives are available in Manual Partitioning
4) Select partition/drive to copy
5) Select the "copy to" location as the new drive
6) Do not use "fast copy"
7) You have a choice whether to leave the partition/drive the same size or to expand/shrink the partition/drive automatically. The partition(s) will remain proportionally the same on the new drive.
Ex: If a drive is 20GB, the partition to be copied is 5 GB, it is approximately 25% of the total space on the drive.
Copy the partition to a new 40 GB drive, it will increase in size to 10 GB and remain approximately 25% of the total space on the new drive.
8) Unhide the new partition/drive and set it active
9) Shutdown completely.
DO NOT REBOOT THE SYSTEM INTO WINDOWS 2000 ON EITHER DRIVE.
10) Remove or disconnect the original drive.
11) Change the jumpers and/or location in the system for the new drive to be the master drive on the primary IDE controller.
12) Reboot the system and redetect the new hard drive configuration in BIOS (some BIOS do this automatically on boot up)
13) Boot Windows 2000
Windows 200 may do a file system integrity check. Please allow it to continue the check as you may not be able to recover the OS if you choose to exit the system check.
IF YOU COPIED THE PARTITION WITH SYSTEM COMMANDER INSTALLED TO IT, YOU MAY NEED TO RE-ENABLE SYSTEM COMMANDER OR UNINSTALL AND REINSTALL IT BEFORE IT WILL WORK PROPERLY.
This can be a problem if you are dual-booting operating systems or if you used System Commander to capture GRUB or LILO master boot records. The OSes in these cases may no longer boot.
Problem:
Windows 2000 will automatically move the pagefile to the new drive if you boot the OS and it sees the second hard drive. The "copy" of the OS will not boot and will give you a "pagefile missing" error. The only way the original Win 2000 partition will boot is if both drives are installed to the system.
This can be corrected by forcing Windows 2000 to move the pagefile back to the first hard drive, shut down and remove the new hard drive, boot into Windows to verify bootup, shutdown and start the above steps again.
FYI: if you copy a hard drive in a Windows 2000 or XP machine and then put that newly copied hard drive into a different machine which has a different motherboard and/or chipset, etc. When you try to boot the newly copied Windows 2000 or XP hard drive in a different machine you will get an "Inaccessible_Boot_Device" error or maybe other errors as well. This is because the information about the chipsets, drivers, hardware, etc. in the original machine is "bound into" Windows 2000 and XP so it won't boot in a hardware environment which is so different from its original hardware.