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Problem After Ghosting to new HDD

Hello.

I have a dual-boot Win2kPro/Win2kServer system on an old hard disk. I made some partitions on a new hard disk and ghosted the two partitions from the old hard disk to the new one. I am able to log into the 2kPro OS but not into the 2kServer OS. As soon as I log into Server, the system begins to log me in and then immediately logs me back out. I tried booting into safe mode but I am experiencing the same thing. I think that the ARC name is OK since it boots into a GUI login, wayyy past bootloader. It has a 128-meg pagefile.sys (which is an OK size on the old hard drive). Has anyone seen this before?

Thanks

rhinoceros

Due to dual-boot Harddisk, it will has one boot.ini file different with the normal one. So I suggest you should use the 'Disk to Disk' rather than Ghost image by partition as well.

I also suppose the size of new HD is larger than the old one, you can enlarge the size to any partition during Ghost processing.

I hope it can help.

Snakie1066

ASKER

Thanks for your comments. I did indeed use the partition-to-partition method but I don't believe that is the culprit since the Win2k pro OS comes up OK. BOOT.INI came over fine and BOOTLOADER understands the ARC paths (as I saw during safe mode when it lists what it's loading from the HDD using ARC notatiion).

The size of the partitions did grow and that is not a problem either. I can easily read files off of both of the freshly-ghosted partitions.

So what is wrong with the Win2kServer partition that is not wrong with Win2kPro?

fstani

What probably happened is that since you made a partiton-to-partition ghost, some of the boot files need by WIN2KServ, are not on the BOOT Record, I would suggest making a Disk-To-Image or Disk-To-Disk, and resizing the partitions when prompted to...

This way you can guarantee that you will have a perfect copy of the entire system.

Bye...

SycHo_SNaiL

Windows NT Systems don't like changing partition sizes during ghosting. I would ghost the partitions to the new disk keeping the original sizes and then use a program like Partition Magic to increase the partition size after.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

YarnoSG

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Snakie1066

ASKER

Snakie1066

ASKER

Oops, refresh button reposted yesterday's comments...

Snakie1066

ASKER

OK, now I tried the following:

1. Wipe out target HDD & do disk-to-disk ghosting
Result: Same thing; I have a message about Limited Virtual Memory now

2. Delete out the pagefile.sys on the Win2kServer partition (turns out that Win2kPro was using that file so I reconfigged Win2kPro Mem allocation to delete the file, verifying it was gone with another boot to Win2kPro)
Result: No change (AND Win2kServer did not create the pagefile.sys for itself!)

3. Connect to registry remotely and delete out keys from HKLM\System\MountedDevices
Result: No change but Win2kServer DID indeed rebuild the entries for this key

****
Alright. So what is left to try? Is it time to do the repair console or something? Why won't Server make the pagefile.sys it needs after I deleted out what was there?

Snakie1066

ASKER

So, this was not a MBR problem (as I had run fdisk /mbr before and disk-to-disk was no improvement); it was a drive mapping problem.

Yes, the links from YarnoSG were indeed ultimately helpful. This was a combination of the following three problems:

1. Drive Letter of the new Win2KServer partition
2. Path to pagefile.sys
3. Path to userinit.exe

Using the links suggested in the answer, I was able to connect to the registry over the network and make the changes. Thanks much to everyone for their help.