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General discussion

Installing a used hard drive with Win2000 in a 98 IBM

Feb 11, 2005 3:39AM PST

Hey guys,

I have an old hard drive from work that had Windows 2000 on it. My cpu at home is a 98 or 99 IBM Aptiva that had Windows 98 on it and kept freezing up on me. So, I took out the 98 hard drive that came with it and put in my work drive with 2000.

My cpu (the Aptiva) seems to be able to find the hard drive and says it has no errors, but it is not reading Windows 2000 on it. It is only reading 1.something GB, when it has 10GB, and it is listing DOS as the main operating system.

When I startup, I get the Aptiva screen, it starts to load Windows, and then I get a blue screen with a "Stop" message that recommends running FDISK.

When I put in my recovery CD and restart, it runs diagnostics and tells me everything is fine - it just can't find windows. My only choices are to reformat and lose everything on that drive (which I wanted to use as is) or do this FDISK partition thing, which is all greek to me. I know nothing of DOS.

How can I make it read Win 2000? Is it possible that is can't simply because it was a 99 comp? Thanks for your help - I am not very technically savvy.

Discussion is locked

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Don't dump anything YET.
Feb 11, 2005 4:13AM PST

Await more competent help than this writer. Just a hint; Win 2K uses the NTFS File System, and DOS cannot read NTFS.

Hopefully someone will tell you how to solve the problem.

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Do you have the W2K cd
Feb 11, 2005 4:28AM PST

that went with the harddrive? You only mention the Aptiva recovery disk....and that one won't work unless you wipe the drive clean and start over with W98, which is on the recovery disk you have.

If you have the cd....or if you can borrow the one from work long enough to use it to repair the MBR (Master Boot Record) of W2K you might have a chance.

There is a program that will allow DOS to read the drive contents even though it's in NTFS format, but that won't get you to a desktop.

Something else you can try is to go to http://www.bootdisk.com and download the bootdisks for W2K that they have. That might help you get into the Recovery Console of W2K on the harddrive.

The file you download will create three or possibly four bootdisks for W2K....I'm not sure since I created mine from within W2K itself. One of them should let you get into the Recovery Console. Once you download the file, have some clean floppy disks handy, and click the .exe file you downloaded. It will show you the progress of creating the bootdisk(s) and will let you know when you either have to put in the next floppy disk or tell you it's done.

Then come on back and somebody will help you with understanding how to use it.

TONI