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Now that everyone wants to upgrade to P4's :-) I thought my results from this weekend's fun should be shared.
Moved my wife's W2K system from her Asus P5A AMD K6III-450 to my old Asus K7M Athelon-700. Her system started life as a 486 running windows 3.1 on 340 MB drive and has been upgraded to Win95 on P166 & 1GB drive, Win98 (after win95 hosed itself up so bad re-installing wouldn't fix it), to Win98se on 6GB drive & P5A (after Win98 hosed itself up so bad re-installing wouldn't fix it) to finally W2K, where its done nothing but work 100% reliably ever since.
Here's what I did:
Install new bigger disk in old computer, format NTFS, and do backup (under C:-> Properties->Tools) to the new drive. Be sure "Save System State" is checked down at the bottom of the explorer tree.
Move new drive and her old CDROM, floppy, network card, and video card (G400) to the new motherboard, do fresh install to the new disk without re-formatting.
After installing Via & AMD patches, G400, network, built-in sound drivers, restore the previously saved *.bkf file being sure the "Restore Security Settings" box is checked. After reboot I installed the ISA modem, I had to get the modem working since our DSL was down this weekend :-(, and CR-RW drive. So far everything is working great. I did have to change the modem selection in the dialup neworking since the modem was com4 on the old system and is com3 on the new system, but all passwords, shortcuts, Email, and other personal settings appear intact. Nero5.5 burned a CD-R successfully, and MM Jukebox played (attemped to, but no DSL) the Adult Alternative rock station she was last listening to when fired up.
The above was, of course, all done as Administrator, and I only created an Administrator account on the fresh install using the same password I had for her original install, I don't think having the same password matters, but its what I did.
Other than the faster speed and larger hard drive, she'd never know anything was changed since I put the new motherboard in her old case -- after the restore her desktop video mode and icons were the same -- almost too easy.
Bottom line, its of course safer to re-install everything from scratch, but if you are willing to risk an hour or two of potentially totally wasted time vs how long it'll take to re-install everything and reconfigure your settings, give this a try first. Note that I did not install SP2, the restore put back SP2. I may re-install SP2 if I see any problems but so far not needed. All the Win3.1--Win9x upgrades were far more work and aggravation.
I set her old drive up on a shelve as a backup, eventually I'll reformat it and use it elsewhere of give it away (only 6GB).
Fortunately DSL service was restored late last night.
I did have one complication since I had to do the initial install to WINDOWS instead of the default WINNT directory so the restore would come out correctly, You won't have this problem if you are starting from W2K.
--wally.
Moved my wife's W2K system from her Asus P5A AMD K6III-450 to my old Asus K7M Athelon-700. Her system started life as a 486 running windows 3.1 on 340 MB drive and has been upgraded to Win95 on P166 & 1GB drive, Win98 (after win95 hosed itself up so bad re-installing wouldn't fix it), to Win98se on 6GB drive & P5A (after Win98 hosed itself up so bad re-installing wouldn't fix it) to finally W2K, where its done nothing but work 100% reliably ever since.
Here's what I did:
Install new bigger disk in old computer, format NTFS, and do backup (under C:-> Properties->Tools) to the new drive. Be sure "Save System State" is checked down at the bottom of the explorer tree.
Move new drive and her old CDROM, floppy, network card, and video card (G400) to the new motherboard, do fresh install to the new disk without re-formatting.
After installing Via & AMD patches, G400, network, built-in sound drivers, restore the previously saved *.bkf file being sure the "Restore Security Settings" box is checked. After reboot I installed the ISA modem, I had to get the modem working since our DSL was down this weekend :-(, and CR-RW drive. So far everything is working great. I did have to change the modem selection in the dialup neworking since the modem was com4 on the old system and is com3 on the new system, but all passwords, shortcuts, Email, and other personal settings appear intact. Nero5.5 burned a CD-R successfully, and MM Jukebox played (attemped to, but no DSL) the Adult Alternative rock station she was last listening to when fired up.
The above was, of course, all done as Administrator, and I only created an Administrator account on the fresh install using the same password I had for her original install, I don't think having the same password matters, but its what I did.
Other than the faster speed and larger hard drive, she'd never know anything was changed since I put the new motherboard in her old case -- after the restore her desktop video mode and icons were the same -- almost too easy.
Bottom line, its of course safer to re-install everything from scratch, but if you are willing to risk an hour or two of potentially totally wasted time vs how long it'll take to re-install everything and reconfigure your settings, give this a try first. Note that I did not install SP2, the restore put back SP2. I may re-install SP2 if I see any problems but so far not needed. All the Win3.1--Win9x upgrades were far more work and aggravation.
I set her old drive up on a shelve as a backup, eventually I'll reformat it and use it elsewhere of give it away (only 6GB).
Fortunately DSL service was restored late last night.
I did have one complication since I had to do the initial install to WINDOWS instead of the default WINNT directory so the restore would come out correctly, You won't have this problem if you are starting from W2K.
--wally.
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