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I'm having a problem with my dual-boot Windows NT installation. I recently bought a new system that came with Windows 98 preinstalled on a FAT32 6GB hard disk with a single partition. I used PowerQuest's PartitionMagic to reduce the FAT32 partition to about 4GB and create a 2GB extended partition. I also created a small (approximately 7MB) FAT partition in front of the FAT32 partition to house the BootMagic boot manager. Then, I used PartitionMagic to format the 2GB partition as NTFS. I tried to boot Win98 at this point, and everything was still working. Next, I booted from the NT setup disks, installed to my 2GB NT partition, and rebooted. At the end of the installation, when I attempted to boot into NT, I got only a blinking cursor. When I boot to a DOS boot disk and run PartitionMagic or Fdisk, the tools recognize the NTFS-formatted partition as a FAT16 partition. NT Setup formats the partition as FAT16, even though I'm telling setup to format the partition as NTFS. The \winnt directory appears to contain the proper contents, but the hard disk won't boot. I'm assuming that NT can boot from an extended partition. Any idea what is going on here?
You mention that you used both PartitionMagic and NT Setup to format the volume as NTFS. Setup first reformats the disk as FAT16 because the NTFS format comes from a FAT-to-NTFS conversion that occurs during Setup's second phase. NT basically lies to you when you choose to format a volume as NTFS during setup and sneaks in a FAT-to-NTFS conversion later. You can witness this process if you watch closely during the second phase of setup when it converts the volume to NTFS and reboots the system. (Windows 2000 first formats partitions as NTFS; therefore, Win2K NTFS partitions don't require conversion.)
Regarding the question of whether NT can boot from an extended partition, the \winnt folder can reside on an extended partition. This partition is called the NT boot partition. However, the system partition (i.e., the partition that x86 systems actually boot from) must always reside on an active primary partition that in turn resides within the first 4GB of the hard disk (i.e., within the disk's first logical 1024 cylinders). For more information about NT Setup partition limits, see the Microsoft articles "Boot Partition Created During Setup Limited to 4 Gigabytes" (http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q119/4/97.asp) and "Windows NT Partitioning Rules During Setup" (http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q138/3/64.asp).
One of my company's domains contains several BDCs that we'd like to move to a different domain. However, we've installed several applications on these BDCs, and we'd prefer not to reinstall the machines. Can we move these machines into the new domain without reinstalling them?
Until now, my answer to this popular question has always been the standard Microsoft response: You must reinstall a domain controller server to join it to a different domain. However, I recently found a new utility that might change my answer and provide new hope in situations such as yours. Microsoft doesn't support the following procedure, which entails some risk to your system, so be certain that you have a full system backup before you attempt this procedure.
For some time, Systems Internals has offered a SID-modification utility called NewSID that lets you change computer SIDs on machines that you've used disk-duplication software to clone. The latest version of the tool, NewSID 3.0, includes an interesting twist: the ability to copy the SID of a machine residing on the network to the local machine.
Unlike workstations and member servers, all domain controllers within a domain share the same SID (which represents that domain's SID). Because NewSID, which Figure 1, page 172, shows, lets you synchronize the local machine's SID with a remote system's SID, you can move a BDC to another domain simply by synchronizing it with any other domain controller in the target domain. Using this option might present unexpected consequences in some applications, but the tool might be worth trying if you find the prospect of reinstalling the BDC daunting. (You'll need to test each application to verify functionality.) You can download NewSID from Systems Internals' Web site (http://www.sysinternals.com/newsid.htm).
If you're wary about using such a radical tool, consider trying DC Mover from Fastlane Technologies (http://www.fastlane.com). DC Mover, which is part of Fastlane's DM/Manager, lets you save a domain controller's important system-configuration data (e.g., file and print share configuration information) before migration, then restore the configuration data to the server after you reinstall it in the new domain. Although this utility can save you time and effort, using it to move a domain controller from one domain to another still requires that you reinstall NT and all server applications on the server.
Over the past few years, my company has been using Symantec's Norton Ghost to roll out Windows NT Workstation 4.0 clients. However, we haven't been using the accompanying Ghost Walker utility to change machine SIDs after duplication. This situation presents an obvious security problem—the duplication of machine and user SIDs. How can I identify NT system SIDs on my machines to locate duplicates? I tried using the >Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Resource Kit's getsid.exe utility, but I could obtain reports on only users—not machines. Can you help me with this problem?