Can I simply swap hard drives?

[xmenxmen]

This is so true.  Either everyone on here are quite in experience to this stuff or just have crappy luck. 

And to the one mentioning HAL, if you look at his system, you can see that he's going from a 1ghz to a 1.7ghz, both are single cpu and either one has more than one core, so HAL is not a problem!

Why don't you tell me what you think HAL means, and then I'll tell you what it really means.

I don't know, so why don't u tell me.     And while you are at it, tell me how many of those home pc that are not "ACPI". 

[leapinlew]

This is so true.  Either everyone on here are quite in experience to this stuff or just have crappy luck. 

And to the one mentioning HAL, if you look at his system, you can see that he's going from a 1ghz to a 1.7ghz, both are single cpu and either one has more than one core, so HAL is not a problem!

Why don't you tell me what you think HAL means, and then I'll tell you what it really means.

I don't know, so why don't u tell me.     And while you are at it, tell me how many of those home pc that are not "ACPI". 

I know you don't know.... everyone knows you don't know. 

Pretty much every machine I've been working on for the last half a dozen years or so have been ACPI compliant. Not sure what that has to do with what were talking about, but whatever. If you've had luck swapping drives around from one computer to another good for you. I've tried to do it plenty of times and it pretty much always bombs out unless the recipient computer has identical hardware. 

[Avrus]

How many of you are hardcore enough to remember?

xcopy32 /s /e /r /h /c /k /y

[XyloSesame]

How many of you are hardcore enough to remember?

xcopy32 /s /e /r /h /c /k /y

And how many have graduated to robocopy?

[Teebor]

The worst experience I have had was when I was building 30 identical PC's from the same batch, I built the first one with windows XP and then cloned it to the remaining 29.  Alhough the hardware was identical in every respect none of the rest of the machine would work, I think it was due to the memory addresses being slightly different on each machine which caused it to crash.

However I have removed a windows XP drive from two completely different machines with different chipsets and because they were so different windows XP had to re-detect everything and worked ok.

Windows 2000 used to be even better at it then windows  XP, windows XP sometimes flakes out, at which point if you re-install the OS back over the top of itself it rebuilds the hardware portion of the registry, changes a couple of settings in the software part back to defaults but leaves everything else intact.

Of course none of this works if you are using SATA or raid as its effectively a complete start from scratch as it normally fails.

[acro-ii]

Yes it IS working.  I did 2 yesterday, and both went fine.

 

I do agree, it isn't guaranteed to work, but it is my FIRST choice, as it is so much easier than reloading.  If it does not work, I'm only out about 30 minutes.  If it does, it saves me twice that much!

You are.
Boot from XP CD with same service pack revision as is on your machine.
Go past the setup option to repair using recovery console.
It scans for the current os.
Then you get a repair option.
It works perfectly.  That's how I fix 90% of the pcs that poeple bring into my office.

This is not currently working, once you finish the repair you can no longer install windows updates. Have you done a repair in the past month? I've seen about seven fail.

[xmenxmen]

How many of you are hardcore enough to remember?

xcopy32 /s /e /r /h /c /k /y

And how many have graduated to robocopy?

yet again, I don't.     But I surely remember ncopy and hcopy.

[xmenxmen]

This is so true.  Either everyone on here are quite in experience to this stuff or just have crappy luck. 

And to the one mentioning HAL, if you look at his system, you can see that he's going from a 1ghz to a 1.7ghz, both are single cpu and either one has more than one core, so HAL is not a problem!

Why don't you tell me what you think HAL means, and then I'll tell you what it really means.

I don't know, so why don't u tell me.     And while you are at it, tell me how many of those home pc that are not "ACPI". 

I know you don't know.... everyone knows you don't know. 

Pretty much every machine I've been working on for the last half a dozen years or so have been ACPI compliant. Not sure what that has to do with what were talking about, but whatever. If you've had luck swapping drives around from one computer to another good for you. I've tried to do it plenty of times and it pretty much always bombs out unless the recipient computer has identical hardware. 

Generally I would take the time to educate, but this case, I will just won't.  If you can't figure out what changes actually cause the replace of the HAL and what doesn't, that's really your problem. 

If u are calling bull or whatever u like to call, that's good for you.  There's reason why some can do certain thing better than other.  I will leave it at that.

That's all my comment for this thread.. 

[MrMojoZ]

That's all my comment for this thread.. 

Good, while hilarious it is best to keep Mis-information to a minimum. The amount of cores don't cause the swap out blue screen, only the change in controllers.

[MrMojoZ]

Yes it IS working.  I did 2 yesterday, and both went fine.

Verify that windows updates can still install.

[MrMojoZ]

Windows Server OS is the best at recognizing new hardware and new drivers without using the floppy. 

And in the few times it wants the floppy, you can just virtually connect a floppy through the network and upload the driver directly without an actual floppy drive.

He is talking about controllers that require F6 during the windows install. IE any SATA raid or newer SCSI controller. And once again we are not talking about installing devices while booted into windows, all these problems prevent the OS from loading at all. There is no hardware detection if you blue screen during bootup or if the OS installer can't see a HD.

[unclet]

I did not read this whole thread, but wanted to mention that I always have two drives in my cabinets.  The first hard drive (C:) is small and is used for the operating system only.  The second hard drive (D:) is where all of the emulator stuff is installed.  If I ever upgrade to a new computer (I did this twice so far), then I reformat the first hard drive (C:) and install the new operating system.  After the computer comes up fine then simply plug in the second hard drive (D:) and the drive is recognized and all emulator stuff exists and is configured already.

[acro-ii]

Yes it IS working.  I did 2 yesterday, and both went fine.

Verify that windows updates can still install.

Yes, the ones from yesterday did.  One last week did not.  It's an easy fix if it does not, I run a nice little utlity called dial-a-fix, and reset all windows update stuff(.dll's and all).  Then you're good to go.

[Green Giant]

Windows Server OS is the best at recognizing new hardware and new drivers without using the floppy. 

And in the few times it wants the floppy, you can just virtually connect a floppy through the network and upload the driver directly without an actual floppy drive.

He is talking about controllers that require F6 during the windows install. IE any SATA raid or newer SCSI controller. And once again we are not talking about installing devices while booted into windows, all these problems prevent the OS from loading at all. There is no hardware detection if you blue screen during bootup or if the OS installer can't see a HD.

Yes, I realize you are talking about the harddrive controllers which must be there to see the drive.  Like I said above, when this was a problem we just remotely connected a virtual floppy or cdrom, completely outside of any operating system, and dropped in the drivers necessary.

This probably is a problem with crappier servers like Dell and IBM, but with our hardware, we never had issues.

[leapinlew]

Windows Server OS is the best at recognizing new hardware and new drivers without using the floppy. 

And in the few times it wants the floppy, you can just virtually connect a floppy through the network and upload the driver directly without an actual floppy drive.

He is talking about controllers that require F6 during the windows install. IE any SATA raid or newer SCSI controller. And once again we are not talking about installing devices while booted into windows, all these problems prevent the OS from loading at all. There is no hardware detection if you blue screen during bootup or if the OS installer can't see a HD.

Yes, I realize you are talking about the harddrive controllers which must be there to see the drive.  Like I said above, when this was a problem we just remotely connected a virtual floppy or cdrom, completely outside of any operating system, and dropped in the drivers necessary.

This probably is a problem with crappier servers like Dell and IBM, but with our hardware, we never had issues.

It sounds like your installing the OS using an installer program... like Smartstart. If so, I could see being able to use a virtual floppy, but heres the scenario

You swap the drive from one superior HP server to an equally good HP. The new HP is using an entirely different drive controller and needs to be manually installed during the OS.

There... tell me how you swap drives and make that work. Since you never have issues, I'm curious how this accomplished. The way I see it - you swap the drive and then need to do some software CD Booting magic.

[Green Giant]

Windows Server OS is the best at recognizing new hardware and new drivers without using the floppy. 

And in the few times it wants the floppy, you can just virtually connect a floppy through the network and upload the driver directly without an actual floppy drive.

He is talking about controllers that require F6 during the windows install. IE any SATA raid or newer SCSI controller. And once again we are not talking about installing devices while booted into windows, all these problems prevent the OS from loading at all. There is no hardware detection if you blue screen during bootup or if the OS installer can't see a HD.

Yes, I realize you are talking about the harddrive controllers which must be there to see the drive.  Like I said above, when this was a problem we just remotely connected a virtual floppy or cdrom, completely outside of any operating system, and dropped in the drivers necessary.

This probably is a problem with crappier servers like Dell and IBM, but with our hardware, we never had issues.

It sounds like your installing the OS using an installer program... like Smartstart. If so, I could see being able to use a virtual floppy, but heres the scenario

You swap the drive from one superior HP server to an equally good HP. The new HP was using an entirely different drive controller that was manually installed during the OS.

There... tell me how you swap drives and make that work. Since you never have issues, I'm curious how this accomplished.

Since you sound familiar with HP servers, you must know about iLO.  It operates completely separate of the other hardware assuming you aren't on a brand new prototype server.  Using that I can connect any number of devices and drop in any media format I want. 

But it sounds like you are talking about sata to scsi and the like.  That can't be done without putting in a new controller for the drive connectiong, and switching those out is a pain in the arse.  Most of the time the newer versions of a controller will recognize the older model, but when they don't smartstart can usually fix it with the correct drivers.

But when going scsi to scsi or sata to sata, it will usually work with Windows 2003 95% of the time.

[leapinlew]

Windows Server OS is the best at recognizing new hardware and new drivers without using the floppy. 

And in the few times it wants the floppy, you can just virtually connect a floppy through the network and upload the driver directly without an actual floppy drive.

He is talking about controllers that require F6 during the windows install. IE any SATA raid or newer SCSI controller. And once again we are not talking about installing devices while booted into windows, all these problems prevent the OS from loading at all. There is no hardware detection if you blue screen during bootup or if the OS installer can't see a HD.

Yes, I realize you are talking about the harddrive controllers which must be there to see the drive.  Like I said above, when this was a problem we just remotely connected a virtual floppy or cdrom, completely outside of any operating system, and dropped in the drivers necessary.

This probably is a problem with crappier servers like Dell and IBM, but with our hardware, we never had issues.

It sounds like your installing the OS using an installer program... like Smartstart. If so, I could see being able to use a virtual floppy, but heres the scenario

You swap the drive from one superior HP server to an equally good HP. The new HP was using an entirely different drive controller that was manually installed during the OS.

There... tell me how you swap drives and make that work. Since you never have issues, I'm curious how this accomplished.

Since you sound familiar with HP servers, you must know about iLO.  It operates completely separate of the other hardware assuming you aren't on a brand new prototype server.  Using that I can connect any number of devices and drop in any media format I want. 

But it sounds like you are talking about sata to scsi and the like.  That can't be done without putting in a new controller for the drive connectiong, and switching those out is a pain in the arse.  Most of the time the newer versions of a controller will recognize the older model, but when they don't smartstart can usually fix it with the correct drivers.

I suppose we've now come to the end of the thread.
The question was: Can I simply swap hard drives?
The answer - maybe. Depends on your hardware.

Also - Picard rules.

[More Cowbell]

I did not read this whole thread, but wanted to mention that I always have two drives in my cabinets.  The first hard drive (C:) is small and is used for the operating system only.  The second hard drive (D:) is where all of the emulator stuff is installed.  If I ever upgrade to a new computer (I did this twice so far), then I reformat the first hard drive (C:) and install the new operating system.  After the computer comes up fine then simply plug in the second hard drive (D:) and the drive is recognized and all emulator stuff exists and is configured already.

Actually, I like this idea a lot. I have a few small hard drives hanging around and this would make it easy to simply move a drive or copy it completely and set it up quickly and easily.

[XyloSesame]

I'm curious how this accomplished.

I'm all for learning new tricks as I do this type of thing every day in a professional environment, but I lost interest in the "hows" and "whys" when everyone started talking about the possibility (and probability) of using third-party utilities. Add that to the fact that you would never have a clean machine after the OS redetects and installs new drivers, and I'm out.

Teach me a new trick that does things the right way, works outside of a sealed environment (iLO), and saves time. Not shortcuts that may or may not work and will certainly leave residual.

I suppose we've now come to the end of the thread.
The question was: Can I simply swap hard drives?
The answer - maybe. Depends on your hardware.

Again, Lew, well said.

[Green Giant]

Also - Picard rules.

I knew we could come to an agreement.

[MrMojoZ]

The repair issue and fix walkthrough:

http://windowssecrets.com/2007/09/27/03-Stealth-Windows-update-prevents-XP-repair

[leapinlew]

And here are some Kittens:

[ahofle]

FWIW, I've upgraded a motherboard/CPU and booted with the old HD with no problems either in XP.  My thought was it wouldn't hurt to try seeing as how my alternative was to wipe the hard drive and reinstall everything anyway.  It ended up working, and I saved countless hours of reinstallation (OS and programs).  I'm not saying it always works, but it doesn't hurt to try.

[ahofle]

I did not read this whole thread, but wanted to mention that I always have two drives in my cabinets.  The first hard drive (C:) is small and is used for the operating system only.  The second hard drive (D:) is where all of the emulator stuff is installed.  If I ever upgrade to a new computer (I did this twice so far), then I reformat the first hard drive (C:) and install the new operating system.  After the computer comes up fine then simply plug in the second hard drive (D:) and the drive is recognized and all emulator stuff exists and is configured already.

Actually, I like this idea a lot. I have a few small hard drives hanging around and this would make it easy to simply move a drive or copy it completely and set it up quickly and easily.

Unfortunately, this only works with programs like MAME.  Most programs install shared DLLs,  OCXs, have tons of registry keys, etc.  So you will still have to reinstall those programs.  I would imagine most emulators would be fine though.

[MrMojoZ]

If you really want to make sure your cabinet is covered get it setup like you want it then use a program like Ghost to image the drive. Plop that image on a bootable DVD and you can restore your cabinet PC anytime you feel like it.

[knave]

Ghost is awesome...been using it for years, won't ever go back...