Then it struck me.  I should have used SYSPREP! When transferring the hard drive from one PC to the other, it had problems because everything about the two machines was different; different motherboards, different network cards, different video and sound cards, etc. With SYSPREP you in effect reinstall the operating system in a new computer and the install process will use the proper drivers for the new machine.  The way it works is really pretty simple. Install the operating system and whatever applications, etc. you want on the source machine. Configure it the way you want with network connections and so on. Once you have everything ready, you then need to install and run SYSPREP. This is located in the SUPPORT\Tools folder on your Windows 2000 CD. In there you will find a file called ‘DEPLOY’. Actually it’s DEPLOY.CAB but the .cab is hidden.  Copy this to a folder on your hard drive, typically c:\Deployment Tools. Using the DEPLOY file is a bit tricky. It is actually a compressed file similar to a .ZIP file. When you double click on DEPLOY, it will appear to open up its contents in a folder. However, this is a bit misleading. 

What you are actually seeing is the contents of the CAB file, not a folder. To actually use it, you must extract the files. First go to EDIT on the menu and click on ‘Select All’. Then go to the File menu and select ‘Extract’. It will ask you where to extract it to. Select the folder you created, probably c:\Deployment Tools. NOW you are ready to use it. 

Once you have run SYSPREP, you will need to shut down your computer. The next time your start it up, Windows 2000 will go through an installation, albeit a fast one. If you move the hard drive to another computer, then it will install on that machine and load the appropriate drivers for its hardware.  You will be given the opportunity to accept the licensing, enter a product key, name the computer, and so on depending on how SysPrep was run. This feature can be helpful in more than just moving a hard drive from one machine to another. If you have a means of cloning the hard drive after it’s been SysPrep’d, then you can use this to install a common configuration on many machines quite quickly. This works not only with Windows 2000 Server but also with Windows 2000 Professional.  Unfortunately, from my experimentation it does not appear to work with Small Business Server 2000 so I’ll have to go ahead and install SBS on the lab machine after all!

No Domain Server Available
I was recently called in to help a client resolve a problem they were having connecting some ‘new’ PCs to their network. When they tried to log into their network, they would receive the error “No domain server was available to validate your password”. I checked the TCP/IP settings and everything was fine. I looked at the domain it was trying to access and that was correct. I was even able to browse the network and could connect to the domain controllers and other servers on the network. But I couldn’t properly log on. 

Well, back to the handy TechNet! Actually I simply went to www.Microsoft.com and entered the error message in the Search box. There I quickly found that this is a problem with Windows 95’s handling of TCP/IP and it’s ability to determine the proper NetBIOS name for the domain. TechNet also pointed to a Knowledge Base article, Q182108Availability of Windows Sockets 2.0 for Windows 95 which describes how to get and use the patch that fixes the problem The URL to download the fix is in the KB article but is too big to reproduce here. The file you will end up downloading is W95ws2Setup.exe and will fit on a floppy. You can access the KB article by entering the Q number in the Search on the Microsoft web site. Simply run the fix on the PC, reboot it, and log right in like your supposed to.