Win2000 login problem after HDD salvage

Hi

Ive come up against a problem that I cant see covered on other threads although there was one that seemed to be the same problem but was not fully solved

http://www.techzonez.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14729

I have a Win2000 advanced server with Terminal server which has people logging in from outside the network. I suddenly heard clicking sound on my hard drive and decided I was going to replace it before it was too late (after cooling down it worked for 2 hours and then the same thing happened).

I could have done a fresh install of the server but this would have taken various days at my current work load to get every thing back to normal, with many other people inoperative in the mean time.

So I went for the maxtor disk wizard option (Both drives old and new are Maxtors) to image copy the entire partition from the old 40Gb to the New 80Gb. which worked fine and everything seemed OK.

Then I disconected the old drive ( which was by then a slave) and booted the server, and then I found that on loging in with any user or administrator the system redisplays the CTR-ALT-DEL screen again inmediately and goes no further.

I reconnected the old fualty drive as slave, and to my suprise I can now login. I obviously have a time limit to how long the old drive will hold out, so sooner or later I will need the problem solving.

Does the old drive hold a licensing issue ? or what else could it be ? :o

Any sugestions welcome

Regards Binki

Probably - you need to use norton ghost with the sector copy and preserve disk id switches. Windows Server can be a bit picky when you image it especially when you change hardware, but just changing the HDD is unlikely to kill it.

Easiest and most likely to succeed method would be to create a mirror on the second drive (in windows) then break the mirror and change boot.ini to reflect you are booting from the new disk. This means converting disk 1 to a Dynamic drive first which may be an iffy proposition in your case.

You could also use Windows Backup to Backup the system then restore it to a new system - this usually works too.

I would use the Mirror method myself as it is usually completely dependable.

It looks like w2k changes the physical order of the drives when booting ie

I have - according to the jumper settings - old 40 Gb drive as slave which should be 'D' drive and new 80 Gb drive as master which should be 'C' drive but w2k has changed them round so that 'C' is still the old drive :confused:

Not only that but it seems to have crossed over some critical files between drives, some come from 'D' and some from 'C' like 'My Documents' it displays the desktop from 'D' but if I download a file to the desktop the system uses the other copy of the desktop on the other drive which I then have to find with the windows explorer.:confused::confused::confused:

OK

I disconected old drive (it was on its last legs) and did an install over the top of the winnt on new drive wich took me back to SP3 then did the SP4 install and all is ok.

But this does not explain the strange software engineering of MS why swap files around on diferent drives? if you going to take the slave drive as 'C' then stay with it why take some from here and some from there.:mad:

I wish I could abandon MS totally and use the nice clean linux installations I have become used to :)

Thanks to all