I have bought a new disk, how do I move NT to this new disk?

A. There are various methods, depending on your setup andneeds. The best method is to:

If the tape drive is not an option and the partition is NTFS you still havea number of options, you could setup the new disk as a mirror of your existingdisk, then break the mirror and remove the old disk setting the new disk as theboot disk. You can also use the utility scopy that is suppliedwith the NT resource kit by fitting the new hard disk, creating an NTFSpartition on it and then performing

scopy : : /o /a /s

To use the scopy command you must have Backup and Restore User Rights. Oncethe copy is complete shutdown NT, remove the old drive, and set the new driveto 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 havetime it can be worth creating a temporary NT installation on the drive beforeperforming the copy, booting off of this minimal installation and perform thescopy from there as this means no files will be locked, andthen you would only need to repair the boot sector.

Other methods include ghost copy from http://www.ghostsoft.com and DriveCopy fromhttp://www.powerquest.com which copyand entire disk which should eliminate the need for performing a repair. I haveused the ghostsoft utility and it works well.

Make sure if you are moving NT to a different type of disk, i.e. one thatneeds a different driver, you install the new driver before you perform thecopy 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 thenew disk and make it a mirror of the boot/system partitions. Once it isup-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 theSAM 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 acrossall the other files, some with ling file names, under NT4.