Windows 2000 Quick Fixes

Replace the existing boot disk

When a data drive runs low on space, it’s relatively easy to add additional space—just install a new drive. If desired, you can copy the data from the old drive to the new one and remove the old drive. With a system drive, however, it’s not so easy. You have to perform a few extra steps to make the new drive bootable and change the drive sequence.

There are a couple of ways to approach the problem, but one of the easiest is simply to copy the files to the new drive, then remove the old one. If you have a tape backup system, you could also back up the system to tape, install the new drive, install Windows 2000 on it, and then restore the system. Both methods require several steps.

Tip

The following two methods do not use disk cloning software but rely instead on the xcopy32 and Backup utilities included with Windows 2000. There are a handful of third-party disk cloning tools such as PowerQuest’s Drive Copy (http://www.powerquest.com) and Symantec’s Ghost (http://www.symantec.com). These tools are particularly useful when you need to clone multiple drives or perform the task frequently.

Cloning the drive

You can clone the existing drive to the new one, then remove the existing drive or reconfigure it as a data drive. The following steps assume you’ll be keeping the old drive as a data drive. Read through the procedure to make sure you understand the process before starting:

1. Configure the new drive as a slave (IDE) or with a SCSI ID other than (which is ...