98 to 2000 Upgrade preserving Registry ?

[Frank Griffin]

I recently tried to upgrade a running Win98 partition to Win2000. My
intention was to preserve the desktop and installed application
characteristics, e.g. toolbar icons, file opening preferences, etc.

The install gave me an initial choice to either format the partition
in various ways, or else leave the existing filesystem there, and I
chose the latter. I didn't notice any other options for migrating the
registry or anything similar.

When the install was done, I had an absolutely vanilla 2000 640x480
desktop, and all of the 98 registry information was gone.

Is there any way, either during the install or after it, to migrate
the 98 registry info to the new 2000 system ?

TIA

[Ghostrider]

Post by Frank Griffin
I recently tried to upgrade a running Win98 partition to Win2000. My
intention was to preserve the desktop and installed application
characteristics, e.g. toolbar icons, file opening preferences, etc.
The install gave me an initial choice to either format the partition
in various ways, or else leave the existing filesystem there, and I
chose the latter. I didn't notice any other options for migrating the
registry or anything similar.
When the install was done, I had an absolutely vanilla 2000 640x480
desktop, and all of the 98 registry information was gone.
Is there any way, either during the install or after it, to migrate
the 98 registry info to the new 2000 system ?
TIA

The registry systems between the Windows 9X line (of which Win98 is a
derivative) and the Windows NT line (which begat Windows 2000 and XP)
are supposedly different. It was not possible to migrate the registry settings
from a Win9X system to WinNT. In all probability, the same situation holds
here for Windows 2000. Also, system administrators feel that there is enough
difference between Windows 98 and Windows 2000 to recommend a clean
install instead of trying any attempts at migrating from Win98 or importing its
peripheral drivers and all.

[Frank Griffin]

Post by Ghostrider
The registry systems between the Windows 9X line (of which Win98 is a
derivative) and the Windows NT line (which begat Windows 2000 and XP)
are supposedly different. It was not possible to migrate the registry settings
from a Win9X system to WinNT. In all probability, the same situation holds
here for Windows 2000. Also, system administrators feel that there is enough
difference between Windows 98 and Windows 2000 to recommend a clean
install instead of trying any attempts at migrating from Win98 or importing its
peripheral drivers and all.

I'm not interested in carrying over drivers, just app-level things
like icons, toolbars, menu items, and file-opening defaults set when
applications were installed. Re-installing a ton of 98 apps is just
going to make the same Registry calls they made on the 98 system.

Basically, I don't want to have to reinstall every app that was on the
98 system. This has to be a common problem. Are you sure there is no
way to get Win2K to import application-level stuff from a 98 registry
?

[Rich Grise]

Well, I've only read about this, and in fact am trying to do
something similar myself: Why not just leave it there? You're
going to need a new drive anyway, right? If I understand
accurately, you could just leave it on its own partition,
devote the whole new drive to W2K, and just put the W98
partition in W2K's boot manager. Or run it as a process,
which I also haven't read up on how to do.

I did mine a little different - I got a whole new computer,
with an 80 GB drive, for W2K. I popped the 4GB drive out
of the AMD 6X86P150, and temporarily make it IDE1 in the
new box. Just dragged and dropped the whole thing onto
a directory on my data partition, and almost everything
runs just like it used to, except 15 times faster. :-)

This is just the apps - I haven't tried running W95 itself
as an app yet. Or at least I don't think so. :-)

Good Luck!
Rich

Post by Frank Griffin

Post by Ghostrider
The registry systems between the Windows 9X line (of which Win98 is a
derivative) and the Windows NT line (which begat Windows 2000 and XP)
are supposedly different. It was not possible to migrate the registry settings
from a Win9X system to WinNT. In all probability, the same situation holds
here for Windows 2000. Also, system administrators feel that there is enough
difference between Windows 98 and Windows 2000 to recommend a clean
install instead of trying any attempts at migrating from Win98 or importing its
peripheral drivers and all.

I'm not interested in carrying over drivers, just app-level things
like icons, toolbars, menu items, and file-opening defaults set when
applications were installed. Re-installing a ton of 98 apps is just
going to make the same Registry calls they made on the 98 system.
Basically, I don't want to have to reinstall every app that was on the
98 system. This has to be a common problem. Are you sure there is no
way to get Win2K to import application-level stuff from a 98 registry
?