>Buy an extra hardrive and put in the machine. Then buy a copy of Norton Ghost http://smallbiz.symantec.com/Products.cfm?Product=ghost&EID=0&CS=X&PID=na, it's a drive cloner. Now install NT and your apps. When you feel you have a stable install, clone your main drive over to the backup. Don't use the BU drive for anything else.
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>Now you can install something for testing and if it blows up NT, you can simple clone your backup to your master and be back at the last safe install point. If the install works and is stable (say after testing it for a few days) you can clone your now stable master to the BU drive. In essence slowy increment the BU to a stable install. It takes about 20 minutes to do a clone.
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>I keep a seperate hard drive with a stable install of NT and all of our general apps for just that purpose. Actually I think Norton will let you create a ghost image on a server so you may not even need the extra harddrive.
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>You may want to have your LAN guys look at Ghost and also IC3 http://www.innovativesoftware.com/imagecast/home.htm for deployment of NT once you get ready.

Funny you should mention Ghost, I'm using it for my network NT install right at this very moment :) It's just a base Ghost clone install, though it does have MS Office. It's not worth the trouble of an extra drive just for a test machine. And if 1000 users need extra drives to move to NT, well, you can forget moving to NT :)

That's an interesting idea about storing the Ghost info on the server - but I don't know that it would be practical for 1000 users constantly cloning. The LAN security people might not like it, either. If we ever move to NT, I think users (including me) will have to get used to doing regular server backups of all our local stuff for precaution. Boy, is it easy to hose NT (in my environment, at least). I don't know if we'll be moving to NT now, there are too many risks at this point, that outweigh the benefits. But I will keep testing, anyway.

I have Ghost at home on my 98SE, also, though haven't had to use it yet, but it seems like a good idea to have.