Can I copy the OS from this hard drive?

TimTim Southwest PA Icrontian
edited December 2004 in Science & Tech
I bought a 10 GB Western digital hard drive at a computer show today. The people selling it said it was blank, but it turned out to have a copy of Windows 2000 Professional on it!

This is cool, I was planning to buy a copy of 2000 off of eBay but the prices kept getting bid up too high (over $30) for me.

So now that it seems I have a copy of 2000, I'd like to make a backup CD of it, in case the hard drive gets screwed up. Can this be done by just copying the WINNT folder to a CD?

I got my NF-7 motherboard driver CD and my 9200SE video card driver CD, and they installed just fine. But I'm planning to use this hard drive with an Abit BP6 motherboard once it gets here. Right now I have this hard drive connected as the only hard drive in my main computer just to test it out.

Comments

  • TimTim Southwest PA Icrontian
    edited December 2004
    Upon further inspection, I don't know what to think of it. The 10 GB hard drive and its 2000 operating system is insisting that there's a second hard drive installed with a 15.6 MB capacity, with a FAT 12 bit partition. There isn't. And although it can read from CDs, it won't write to them, or even provide the options. All I can do is click on a file and select Copy, then go over the CD drive icon and click Paste, and that doesn't work.

    Maybe I'll just load it up with antivirus and antispyware software, and run it as is for as long as it works.

    Any ideas?
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited December 2004
    well you definitely can't make an OS CD off of an installed copy of the operating system, that much I can tell you.

    I would just use it until it dies. a 10 gigger is old, and will probably only last you a couple of years.
  • EMTEMT Seattle, WA Icrontian
    edited December 2004
    For one thing you probably won't be able to copy every bit of crucial stuff in WINNT while that folder is running the OS. It is of course theoretically possible to duplicate it, and you could do it realistically by imaging the whole drive. More selectively would take some doing. My guess is you would need the following.

    1) All of \WINNT
    2) Some of \Documents and Settings. I don't know how much, but you could take out obvious stuff like My Documents
    3) Several important files from the root folder (making sure to get hidden ones)

    Then to put this OS copy on another drive, you'd copy that stuff and then write the MBR and boot sector in the recovery console. If you're lucky Windows would then boot - although it would have some significant problems with missing programs, depending on how much is currently on there and how much you uninstall before doing this. If you're not so lucky... you'd probably be SOL without the CD for repair install. Note that recovery console can be had free via boot disks (downloadable).
  • madmatmadmat
    edited December 2004
    If you use Norton Ghost you can make a copy of any drive to CD. It's hard to explain how but it'll split it up onto however many it takes to backup the data and even compress it some.
  • TimTim Southwest PA Icrontian
    edited December 2004
    I put my main system back to its original hard drives. I'll just leave the 10 GB 2000 hard drive as it is. Beef it up with antivirus and antispyware and fold on the bp6 once I get it.

    But I still had 2 unusual problems. Once I had my main system reconnected as normal, it refused to get on the internet until I called Comcast tech support and we went through a few things. We ended up uninstalling the ethernet driver and shutting down the computer. Upon restart all was well.

    And the clock is off. I can fix that now that it's back on the internet.

    I learn something new every now and then.

    I didn't think making a backup would work, but it was worth a try.
  • JimboraeJimborae Newbury, Berks, UK New
    edited December 2004
    Tim wrote:
    Upon further inspection, I don't know what to think of it. The 10 GB hard drive and its 2000 operating system is insisting that there's a second hard drive installed with a 15.6 MB capacity, with a FAT 12 bit partition. There isn't. ...........

    Any ideas?

    Hmmm this has obviously come from a manufactured PC such as Dell, HP Compaq etc. That small partition is a hidden small drive that holds the recovery & back up info that manufactures love to do.

    Apart from having fun to see what other information is on this drive the best thing to do is to totally wipe it & start again, just to make sure there's nothing nasty on it. Personally I'd use a program such as Dban.
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited December 2004
    Jimborae wrote:
    ...That small partition is the hidden small drive that hold the recovery & back up info that manufactures love to do...
    Wish I'd thought of that. :respect:

    If you have a program like Partition Magic it might be able to see the Fat12 partition, unhide it, and convert it into something you can easily copy. If you're real lucky they may have left an image of the entire Win2000 CD on there.
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited December 2004
    EXCEPT for the installer scripting and mini-NT bootup session stuff for 2000, if they did it right (that part normally is on a recovery CD). The hidden image typically has cabs, not all the driver files on a full 2000 CD, and sometimes PART of the installer scripting. Recovery CDs for an OEM install tend to have the rest of the complete package, limited to a subset of driver cabs used by the OEM for a particular model series in order to make the image small enough to not eat too much space.
  • TimTim Southwest PA Icrontian
    edited December 2004
    The hard drive has Dell files on it, so it must be a Dell hard drive. This is the 10 GB drive. It said there was a second HD hooked up when there wasn't.
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited December 2004
    Tim wrote:
    ...It said there was a second HD hooked up when there wasn't.
    Check what Jimborae said again. There is likely another partition, which can look like a second hard drive. You can have a physical drive, which is what you take out of the box when FedEx brings your newegg order, and many logical drives on that one physical drive.

    If this was still in the Dell you could probably find a utility to download which would let you use the stuff on the second partition.

    What is the size stamped on the drive and what size is reported by Windows? That should give you an idea how big the hidden partition is.
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited December 2004
    The small partiton does not have a cd image of the OS. Its the diagnostic utilitys probaly for a dell or compaq. Its a very small hidden fat32 partition usually.

    Tex
  • BlackHawkBlackHawk Bible music connoisseur There's no place like 127.0.0.1 Icrontian
    edited December 2004
    Sorry to rain on your parade but AFAIK, even if you own the HDD, you don't own the OS so using it would be illegal.

    Also, I may be wrong but I only know of Compaq using a seperate partition for restoring the OS. Dell uses a recovery cd. If you still plan on doing it, you could download 2k, do a repair installation and ghost the installation.
  • muddocktormuddocktor
    edited December 2004
    Black Hawk wrote:
    Sorry to rain on your parade but AFAIK, even if you own the HDD, you don't own the OS so using it would be illegal.

    Also, I may be wrong but I only know of Compaq using a seperate partition for restoring the OS. Dell uses a recovery cd. If you still plan on doing it, you could download 2k, do a repair installation and ghost the installation.


    BH, older Dells also used a separate small partition for restoring to factory new. My old Inspiron 8000 laptop was configured that way when I got it.

    Tim, is there a zztop.exe file on the root of that hard drive? If so, that's the program to restore to factory fresh, if it was in it's original machine.
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited December 2004
    zztop.exe?

    Could it be that the folks at Dell are fans?

    Cheap Sunglasses: :cool:
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