A. There are various methods, depending on your setup and needs. The best method is to:
- Backup your NT disk to a tape
- Create a new, up to date ERD (rdisk -s)
- Shutdown NT and insert the new Hard Disk
- Install a basic installation of NT to a directory with a different name than your final NT installation directory
- Once the installation is finished restore your backup tape
- There are sometimes problems with registry entries, so reboot and boot off of the NT installation disks
- After disk 2 choose repair, and select everything except "Check System Files". You will need to insert disk 3 and then the ERD
- Reboot and NT should work as required
If the tape drive is not an option and the partition is NTFS you still have a number of options, you could setup the new disk as a mirror of your existing disk, then break the mirror and remove the old disk setting the new disk as the boot disk. You can also use the utility scopy that is supplied with the NT resource kit by fitting the new hard disk, creating an NTFS partition on it and then performing
scopy <source drive>: <target drive>: /o /a /s
To use the scopy command you must have Backup and Restore User Rights. Once the copy is complete shutdown NT, remove the old drive, and set the new drive to master (if IDE) or SCSI 0/6 (if SCSI) and boot of the NT installation disks, and again repair everything except "Check System Files". If you have time it can be worth creating a temporary NT installation on the drive before performing the copy, booting off of this minimal installation and perform the scopy from there as this means no files will be locked, and then you would only need to repair the boot sector.
Other methods include ghost copy from http://www.ghostsoft.com and DriveCopy from http://www.powerquest.com which copy and entire disk which should eliminate the need for performing a repair. I have used the ghostsoft utility and it works well.
Make sure if you are moving NT to a different type of disk, i.e. one that needs a different driver, you install the new driver before you perform the copy so that when NT boots off of the new disk it has the needed drivers.
Another option would be to use Mirroring (if you have Server). Install the new disk and make it a mirror of the boot/system partitions. Once it is up-to-date remove the old disk and use the new.
One final point if you are using FAT is that to clone a HDD by copying the SAM and Registry files (which are all 8.3 file names) in a DOS copy operation (thereby avoiding the share violation you would get in NT4) and to copy across all the other files, some with ling file names, under NT4.
