Adding a Windows NT 4 HD to a newer machine

headlikeahole

Hi folks,

My parents own a business that relies on a very large database of around 2000 customers and 3000 items. They've been running this on a machine with wait for it, 24 megs of Ram, Pentium 1 133mhz, a 560 meg HD and Windows NT.

The machine is sort of a hodge podge thrown together by a friend of the family (in my absence!), the CD drive doesnt work, it has no USB ports and no extra room for more RAM. To say the least the thing is on its way out.

I am kindly donating an old windows 98 machine of mine with a faster processor ahem, albeit P2 266 and 128 megs of ram. The thing is I need to copy the system they are using from the older machine to the new machine.

The idea I have is to move the older hard drive to the new machine. Putting the old HD as the primary and moving the database to a slave drive of around 4 gigs.

So a few questions:

Considering the OS on the old machine is NT 4 how well supportive will the newer machine be of the older HD.

The newer machine has the bare necessities in it, ie. cd drive, floppy, an S3 2mb card (lol), usb 1 and a P2 266.

I dont have any driver cd's for the above as it was a hodge podge put together machine as well. Good thing about the machine is it has run nicely for 6 years without any problems whatsoever.

Anyone see any problems so far?

How well would NT 4 support a secondary 4 gig HD?

Thats all for now...

Mossess

If it has run nicely for 6 years without any problems whatsoever and the upgrade is to a 266 I'd advise investing in a backup Tape unit instead of a move. Will the performance upgrade be worth it?
If you are going with it though, just stick in your 98 disk into your NT machine and turn it on, make sure you jumper settings are correct, and copy the DB over onto your 98 HD. Shut down, put back into your 98 PC and boot up and configure.
Don't delete anything. Make sure you have a good backup before trying anything.
What size is the Database?

stevenmu

NTs hardware abstraction layer was supposed to make this kind of thing possible but in practice it isn't really, it'll possibly run but not very fast and not very stable. You don't mention if you still have NT and database software install media or not, if you do just setup the "new" machine from scratch, you should be able to download drivers still from somewhere for most of the bits and pieces. NT will work fine with a 4gig drive but afair it won't support USB.

If you really want to try the current install on the new machine don't use the live hard disk. Clone it onto the newer disk and then boot off that. You don't want to put the live drive in, find it doesn't work and then put it back and find it doesn't work in the old machine either :eek:

headlikeahole

Mossess: the machine that ran fine for 5-6 years was the 266, the 133 on the other hand is really under stress from the DB. It hasnt crashed min you, but I'd rather move the system to a newer machine with more resources.

The database is nearly 100 megs, thats a whole 1/5 of the HD. I think i might ghost the nt HD first, then copy the system over to the win 98 HD.

Stevenmu: I dont have a copy of NT myself, the person who built the machine put it on, he also developed the software for the system and the database, mind you the database is only an access database.

"You don't want to put the live drive in, find it doesn't work and then put it back and find it doesn't work in the old machine either"

That is exactly why I havent touched it!

My plan is to ghost the old drive on to the newer drive and put the newer drive back into the 266 and try it out. See how it runs. Opinions?

Cheers

Mossess

If the DB is company critical I would advise on investing in a tape drive. (Although a CD burner would probably do - or a Zip drive)