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I want to sincerely thank everyone who responded to my pleas for help in
first trying to get my system to boot from a replacement disk drive and,
when that failed, in trying to reinstall NT 4.0.
I did get my system to boot successfully, and the fix turned out to be
embarrassingly simple. (I never did, however, find a way to make NT 4.0
reinstall itself - for now, though, that's a moot issue.)
For those who might face a similar issue in the future, here's the solution:
Contrary to what several people have said, it IS possible to produce a
boot drive by simply copying all files from an existing boot drive to the
replacement drive. It is necessary, however, either to perform the copy
with the system booted to DOS or to load the files from a backup medium
which was produced by a backup program capable of backing up hidden files,
system files, and in-use files. The copy must be checked to ensure that ALL
files from the root of the existing boot drive and all registry files (from
%sysroot%\config) have been copied.
In short, a simple copy is OK provided that you ensure that all files have
been copied.
Next, make sure your boot.ini file correctly specifies the location of the
operating system. If the replacement drive is assigned the same drive
letter (and has the same SCSI ID for SCSI drives) as the old boot drive, the
boot.ini file need not be changed.
Finally (and this is what I had not done), open Disk Administrator and set
the new drive to "active". Presto, you now have a new boot drive!
Carroll Slemaker
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