How to Move a Hard Disk with Windows 2000 Installed to Another Computer
Last updated: 6/19/03

Q.  How can one move a hard disk drive with Windows 2K installed on it to another computer?

A.  My thanks to "itsdoh" in our forums for contributing this info:

"I do it all the time, open up the device manager and delete ALL the devices (Don't let it reboot to 'finish uninstalling'). Once done, shut it down, the move the HD, and boot. It will find a lot of new devices at startup (have the drivers for the machine it's going in to handy)."

"I do it at work with new machines so I don't need to reinstall everything, so far, works fine."

"I created a HD with all our office software and settings, now I just clone it when we get a new machine, or when a machine has more problems than I feel like dealing with."

6/19/03  "I have an addendum to the short FAQ you posted about windows 2000 migration."

"Since the posting of this FAQ, I have learned a few additional things which should help. Some IDE channel controllers are specific enough to a particular system to cause problems. I had this problem specifically when migrating from an Intel chipset to a Via. The symptoms of this were a 'blue screen of death' on boot reading "Inaccessible boot device". The way I solved this was to put the HD back into the old machine, and replace the Intel IDE drivers with the generic windows ones."

"Therefore, my new advice is to remove all system devices, except for the IDE ones, and replace those with the windows '2 channel IDE controller' driver."

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