My new system hangs during boot with the message "Verifying DMI Pool Data I am trying to move from an old board+cpu 9cELERON AT 300MhZ aWARD V4.51pg)under Win2k Server to a new Celeron D340 while keeping to my old C Disk (IBM 16 GB). I will eventually upgrade the disk but I decided on the easier (ha!) approach of just moving my C disk. I reduced my old system to the single disk (master) on the first IDE channel. I can boot cleanyly from this on the old system. I moved the disk to the new system. During the boot the drive is correctly identified as the primay master by the BIOS (Pheonix-AwardBIOS v6.00PG)but then hangs. I can return to the old system and reboot it using the disk. If I boot from the new system with no disk it complains (quite correctly) that there is no boot device. Some extra info: 1) The new board is an MSI with a VIA chipset. 2) The drive is LBA on the old system. 3) Tried different cables including old 40 wire ATA. 4) I have played around with various settings in the BIOS without understanding what they do, but it makes no difference (including clearing the cmos, resetting to default etc) Anyone got any ideas? I am slighly worring about using fixmbr etc because I still have a working system. As an aside what tool(s) should I used to copy the complete contents of one disk to another and make it bootable under Win2K? The target drive will probably be a Maxtor. I have access to other Win 2000 systems so I can treat the system disks as ordinary data disks. I have so much software installed on this old disk that it will take me a while to rebuild everything on a new one. Paul Cotter

You can't just take a HDD from one system & install it in a completely different system & expect it to work. This space for rent

Yes, swapping hard drives with an OS on it around is not a good idea. For the "Hang at Verifying DMI Pool Data" problem, check the following: http://www.dewassoc.com/support/win98/verify_dmi_data.htm

To Jam: In general you can under win2k, by booting in safe mode and then just installing the necessary drivers. The exception to this is when you are moving between uni and multiprocessor systems when you will have hive problems. However, my problem has little to do with windows, except insofar as how the boot partition program is trying to load the nt loader. I think my only solution is to fix the master boot record from the Console repair option from the win 2k setup disk. To : Ham30 Thanks for the link. Unfortunately I have done all those things mentioned that are relevant and available under my Bios. Paul Cotter

You stated that on the old system, the drive was ID'd as LBA. Is it the same in the new system? Make sure that in the BIOS it is ID'd as an LBA drive. You can usually change this manually. If it is ID'd as something else, then it will not work correctly. What can also be problematic is if Win 2000 was using anything but the Generic Hard Drive Controller drivers. These should be reverted to the Generic ones before swapping the drive onto a different motherboard. After you get it booted, you should go into Device Manager, click on View and then Show Hidden Devices and uninstall all the hardware that is left over from your old system. Search Engines Are Your Friends Morpheus: There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. "The Matrix"

I disagree. 1st you gotta fix your hanging problem...that has nothing to do with the OS. You either screwed up a BIOS setting or have something connected incorrectly. Try disconnecting ALL your drives, optical included...does it still hang? If not, double check all your jumper settings & IDE cables. You don't have to mess with the boot record & don't necessary have to boot to safe mode to remove all the devices & drivers related to the old board. (actually, you should have done all that before shutting down for the last time before the swap). You shouldn't have to mess around with the Repair Console either...what you should do is a "repair install" http://www.windowsreinstall.com/windows2000/Repair/index.htm This space for rent

Swapping drives in itself is not the problem. The problem is even when both bios' are set to ID the drive as AUTO sometimes they will see the drive differently. In some cases it will still boot OK but sometimes it won't. Of course if it does boot you'll get all the 'new hardware found' screens as the OS sets up the new hardware. But that's not a problem (yet) since it's not even getting that far. I've noticed brand name PCs like compaq, IBM and HP are more likely to see the a drive differently than are generic boards. If you can get it to boot from a bootdisk, run fdisk and post back what it says under option 4. If that's not it, as Jam mentioned, recheck the jumpers and cables.