Hi 25 - ya, thought of doing it through Linux & I'm sure it's possible somehow using customised boot and root disks. Probably the best/easiest(sic) way. Since I'm moving away from 20 years of monopolistic M$ avarice via Suse 8.1 I'll investigate the matter further.
AFAIK many of the Linux distros support booting off the CD, so that should be OK, but how do you write your samba.conf file on a RO medium? If the kernel supported it, perhaps you could load it dynamically as a module?
The "Bart's msclient bootdisk" isn't a Windows boot floppy, but DOS 7 using a real-mode network driver - the modular boot sequence is quite clever and works nicely. The instructions on the site are terse and the location of one of the boot files was incorrect & needed fixing. I'm still playing with it. Nevertheless, the network IS accessible.
However, copying Windows HDDs in real mode is fraught with problems as Kan Yabumoto of XXCOPY warns:
Q: "Can I stay in DOS (real mode) to duplicate the disk using XXCOPY16?"
A: "We strongly recommend the use of XXCOPY.EXE (the 32-bit version which must run under the Win32 environment), as described in this page. When you stay in the DOS (real mode) environment, you may not be able to access all the files and directories in your disk drive. This is due to the fact that the DOS environment cannot handle a pathname which exceeds the 80 character limit. Although each long name comes with its short name (8.3 format) alias, there could still be a heavily nested, very long path which exceeds the 80-character limit after converting all of the long directory names into their short name alias (for the same reason, SCANDISK fails on certain volume in 16-bit mode).
If all of the files in your drive have a full pathname less than 80 characters, you can use XXCOPY16 with the /CLONE switch to create an interim copy of the source disk which can be made bootable. After you boot into the Win9x environment, you should convert all of the shortnames in your system disk into the corresponding longname using the following command (assuming the D: drive is the original source drive)XXCOPY D:\ C:\ /S /NL
This procedure lets you restore most of the long filenames. However, there will be a small number of files and directories which are made prior to this XXCOPY run (immediately after the first Win9x initialization). That is, you need to perform additional procedures by hand to make necessary adjustments. In short, this procedure is troublesome at best and we don't recommend it to anyone who asks this question in the first place."
Perhaps DOSLFNBK would help and I bet that it is actually possible to do it, though not without considerable effort & tears.
"I'd still copy direct from old disk to new disk rather than via another machine..."
Me too, but although he doesn't explain why he can't go that route I assume that for some arcane reason it is impossible.
FBW seems to imply that only C2 is running XP, so C1 _may_ be using a non-copyprotected OS - anyway, he'd just have to reactivate it if XP got upset about finding itself on a different HDD - as mentioned on another thread it might not notice if the volume ID was set to be the same as the orginal drive.
Curious topic. I wonder what the professionals would say.
Goodnight all....