HD Migration P2 to P4 CPU Windows 2000 Pro SP4

[DaveLembke]

Ok, here is the problem. An important HP Vectra VL7 Pentium II 400 Mhz system running Windows 2000 Pro SP4 died, and its the motherboard. The system needs to be up and running quickly, within the next few days, and I attempted to install the 8.4 GB IDE HD into a newer Compaq Pentium 4 ( 1.7 Ghz ) and the system boots up and gets to the Windows Loading (Bars) dashes at the bottom and upon that bar going solid the next screen is a Kernel Error Blue Screen.

Anyone know if there is a way to safely migrate this HD to a P4, or should I be looking for another Pentium 2 to move the hard drive into, that I dont have on hand and would liekly have to pay $50 for on ebay???

If there was a tool to make this work, I'd rather go that route. I am guessing that the Blue screen is due to a HAL difference at boot, and if there is a HAL tweaker out there to make the system happy with a P4 CPU that would be great.

I know I can go the route of a OS Repair Mode with the OEM 2000 Pro CD, but not sure what problems this could cause being that the OS is SP4 and the CD is SP1 or earlier SP0.

Thanks,

Dave

[squall_01]

You can get motherboard and CPU combos but not for 50 dollars.  Since the data is more important then the PC I would get a external harddrive case.  The harddrive won't work cause of the fact that when you install windows it stores info about what your pc is. aka video card sound card stuff like that.  There isn't any software that will repair it.  So if you want to use a External HardDrive case go to www.computergeeks.com  and it will ship out from California. When you go to use have your HardDrive set to cable select that way the data can be read.

[DaveLembke]

   Thanks for your help... The problem I had was that the software on the system needed to run that was registered against that hardware. I got the Pentium 2 Windows 2000 Pro system running on the Pentium 4 by getting the system virtualized by installing Virtual PC 2007 to my P4 system, and then taking a Ghost 2003 image I had of the system from a few months ago and install the image to the virtual hard drive/virtual session.

   Somehow the VPC environment didnt break the software and it is behaving and faster then ever on the P4 and shared CPU and 256MB Ram of  the 1GB in the P4.

   After the installation of the image to the Virtual PC session, I was able to create a folder share to the C: drive of my P4 system, use a USB to IDE tool to get the data to my C: drive off of the 8.4 GB drive, then pull the data to the Virtual PC environment to migrate the latest data to the system and have it up and running just like before, and faster being that it is on a multitasked P4 compared to the P2.

I am very surprised that the migration to a Virtual PC environment was so simple. Also not quite sure how this works, but the Virtual environment is pulling from DHCP to have a unique IP lease, at the same time another IP lease for my P4 system through a single NIC on this P4 system, and it is working very well. ( 2 IP addresses for the single NIC and I can ping both addresses on my network, so it isnt just a virtualized gateway between the main IP and the virtual desktop.  I guess you could multitask a powerful system into many servers and different IP's through a single adapter if you wanted to, but you wouldnt be able to get around bandwidth saturation if it is busy virtual systems/servers.

I bought and tried VPC 2004 a few years ago and found it to be buggy, but 2007 is awsome! No bugs found yet! Also saw a 64-bit version, but I am still 32-bit. I downloaded and saved the 64-bit for later when I get a 64-bit system and need this handy tool.

I am so happy!!!!

Thanks for your input and link to the ext HD option!

Dave

[patio]

Glad to hear the VPC solution worked...i'm suprised there were no hiccups with Ghost in that enviornment.
I had this issue about 6 months back also with a work PC and to be on the safe side i simply hooked it up as a slave drive and immediately imaged it with Acronis.
Next step was to slipstream all 4 SP's into a Win2K CD.
I then installed to the new machine with the Acronis image and on the prompted reboot instead of letting it continue i used the slipstreamed Win2k to do a repair install which picked up all the new hardware without a glitch. Re-installed all the new MBoard drivers rebooted and thankfully everythin worked perfect.
The only hardware it refused to recognise was the onboard NIC which i solved simply by installing an addon card.
Needless to say the customer was happy.

[DaveLembke]

Hello Patio,

   Well its funny that you mention Ghost hickupping with VPC, as for I tried to virtualize a point of sale server which is running Server 2000 environment and from the ghost image it hangs at the initial Windows load bar.  Bar starts to move from left to right showing that Server 2000 is loading then solid bar and no activity.

CPU of the server and workstation are very similar 2.66 Ghz P4 in server and my workstation is a 2.8Ghz P4, both socket 478 and without HT.

Tried another ghost image to push to VPC and got same results. So for some odd reason that I havent figured out yet... The ghost image took to the VPC of the PII on the P4, in a 2000 Pro VPC environment, but the 2000 server, 2000 Pro, and XP Pro of the other Ghost images lock up at the windows loading screen.

Very strange ... Searched Google to see if others reported problems with Ghost 2003 and VPC 2007 and only saw some old posts in regards to Ghost 2003 and VPC 2004.

Was thinking of doing a Server 2000 Repair off the OEM CD through the VPC environment to see if that would fix the boot instructions to behave with VPC, snce you can create a server 2000 VPC environment without any problems.

Strange that it worked at time of need, but now that I am playing more with Ghost and VPC, they dont want to get along...ha ha

Thanks,

Dave

[patio]

I now use Acronis exclusively but i dug out my personal favorite source for Ghost info...

y Merry Christmas !

[DaveLembke]

Thanks for that link Patio!

Going to see if I can find answers there.

Dave

[patio]

You're more than Welcome Dave...