CtrlAltDel
asked on
Cloning hard disks with Drive Image 2002 under XP Pro
Having bought myself a shiny new hard disk, I thought I'd use Drive Image 2002 to transfer my XP Pro installation lock stock 'n' barrel on to the new disk.
DI quite happily copied everything over, but what it hasn't done is mark the new drive as being bootable, so when I remove the old and make the new drive the primary master, XP won't load as the BIOS can't find a bootable drive.
How do I make my drive bootable?
DI quite happily copied everything over, but what it hasn't done is mark the new drive as being bootable, so when I remove the old and make the new drive the primary master, XP won't load as the BIOS can't find a bootable drive.
How do I make my drive bootable?
I'm assuming the disk was partitioned and formatted
ASKER
Yes, by Drive Image.
I've gone into the Emergency Recovery Console, and played around there with FIXBOOT and FIXMBR, but still no joy...
I've gone into the Emergency Recovery Console, and played around there with FIXBOOT and FIXMBR, but still no joy...
First try doing this with the disk in question being the only disk connected to the machine.
Boot from the XP CD, get into the Recovery Console, and type the following commands:
FIXMBR C:
FIXBOOT C:
If that doesn't work try doing a repair with the disk in question being the only disk connected to the machine. This will usually write the boot sector.
How to Perform an In-Place Upgrade (Reinstallation) of Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q315341
Visual aid to the above procedure
http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_xp.htm
Click on How To Repair Windows XP by Reinstalling
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If that doesn't work then you need to use XP to format the disk. Either boot into XP with both disks connected to the system making sure the XP installation that works is the master on the Primary ID. Then do this
Start > Run diskmgmt.msc and right click on the new disk and select format. It should give you a choice to format with FAT or NTFS. Make sure you choose the one that matches the one on the old disk.
The Crazy One
Boot from the XP CD, get into the Recovery Console, and type the following commands:
FIXMBR C:
FIXBOOT C:
If that doesn't work try doing a repair with the disk in question being the only disk connected to the machine. This will usually write the boot sector.
How to Perform an In-Place Upgrade (Reinstallation) of Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q315341
Visual aid to the above procedure
http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_xp.htm
Click on How To Repair Windows XP by Reinstalling
----------------
If that doesn't work then you need to use XP to format the disk. Either boot into XP with both disks connected to the system making sure the XP installation that works is the master on the Primary ID. Then do this
Start > Run diskmgmt.msc and right click on the new disk and select format. It should give you a choice to format with FAT or NTFS. Make sure you choose the one that matches the one on the old disk.
The Crazy One
Oh and after you foramt you need to do Drive Image again.
ASKER
Well I tried all that on my own initiative, with no joy.
So then I decided to get medieval on it, and just deleted the primary partition and reinstalled XP. XP happily created the new partition, formatted it, installed itself on to it. But when it came to reboot, did it work?
Of course not.
So I have a drive which, so long as I don't try to boot off it, I can read/write to it perfectly well. I just can't boot off it, even after doing a new install of XP Pro.
So then I decided to get medieval on it, and just deleted the primary partition and reinstalled XP. XP happily created the new partition, formatted it, installed itself on to it. But when it came to reboot, did it work?
Of course not.
So I have a drive which, so long as I don't try to boot off it, I can read/write to it perfectly well. I just can't boot off it, even after doing a new install of XP Pro.
Ok when you did this was the only Hard drive on the disk the one you installed to. In other workds pull the old disk from the computer and then do a fresh install, by booting to the CD, on the new drive and then boot and see what happens. At this point DO NOT have the old disk connected to the mahcine at any time during the process.
There are a few possibilities here, so I'll start with the basics given that no one has asked about them.
1. If the drive is to be the primary boot drive, is it at the end of the ribbon cable and not in the middle?
2. Is the drive jumpered correctly to be a primary master?
3. Does the BIOS on your motherboard support Int13 Extensions, and if so, does it support the size drive you upgraded to?
4. Did you FDISK the drive as LBA and FAT 32?
5. When you installed on the drive directly from the XP CD, did you install as FAT 32 or NTFS? If FAT 32, the drive size might exceed the FAT 32 limitation.
Dennis
1. If the drive is to be the primary boot drive, is it at the end of the ribbon cable and not in the middle?
2. Is the drive jumpered correctly to be a primary master?
3. Does the BIOS on your motherboard support Int13 Extensions, and if so, does it support the size drive you upgraded to?
4. Did you FDISK the drive as LBA and FAT 32?
5. When you installed on the drive directly from the XP CD, did you install as FAT 32 or NTFS? If FAT 32, the drive size might exceed the FAT 32 limitation.
Dennis
ASKER
OK...
Crazyone: yes, I physically removed the old Deskstar, leaving the Maxtor as the primary master (and the CD on the secondary master). XP detected the harddrive without problems, allowed me to delete/recreate/format partitions, and installed happily on to it. However, on reboot, I still got an "Error loading operating system", which is what the Abit VP6 says when there is no OS to load
Dew_Associates: in order of asking,
1. Yes
2. Yes
3. It should do; as I mentioned before, if the Maxtor is anything other than the disk containing the OS, it can be read perfectly well. Although thinking about it, I've set the boot partition to be 8Gb - is that too large?
4. XP doesn't do FDISK
5. NTFS of course - I haven't used FAT32 since Win95 OSR2!
Crazyone: yes, I physically removed the old Deskstar, leaving the Maxtor as the primary master (and the CD on the secondary master). XP detected the harddrive without problems, allowed me to delete/recreate/format partitions, and installed happily on to it. However, on reboot, I still got an "Error loading operating system", which is what the Abit VP6 says when there is no OS to load
Dew_Associates: in order of asking,
1. Yes
2. Yes
3. It should do; as I mentioned before, if the Maxtor is anything other than the disk containing the OS, it can be read perfectly well. Although thinking about it, I've set the boot partition to be 8Gb - is that too large?
4. XP doesn't do FDISK
5. NTFS of course - I haven't used FAT32 since Win95 OSR2!
CtrlAltDel,
Although you do not mention how large the drive is, and a BIOS limitation is still a possibility, you may want to try the following:
1. Leave the new drive in place as the master and verify jumper 50 on the drive.
2. Clear the CMOS on the VP6 and then reset the BIOS to its defaults at the first boot after clearing.
3. Now use a Win98 boot disk and Fdisk and format the drive and then run chkdsk.
*No 8GB shouldn't be too large, but the entire drive size may be the problem. How large is the drive?
Although you do not mention how large the drive is, and a BIOS limitation is still a possibility, you may want to try the following:
1. Leave the new drive in place as the master and verify jumper 50 on the drive.
2. Clear the CMOS on the VP6 and then reset the BIOS to its defaults at the first boot after clearing.
3. Now use a Win98 boot disk and Fdisk and format the drive and then run chkdsk.
*No 8GB shouldn't be too large, but the entire drive size may be the problem. How large is the drive?
ASKER
Well I tried all that on my own initiative, with no joy.
So then I decided to get medieval on it, and just deleted the primary partition and reinstalled XP. XP happily created the new partition, formatted it, installed itself on to it. But when it came to reboot, did it work?
Of course not.
So I have a drive which, so long as I don't try to boot off it, I can read/write to it perfectly well. I just can't boot off it, even after doing a new install of XP Pro.
So then I decided to get medieval on it, and just deleted the primary partition and reinstalled XP. XP happily created the new partition, formatted it, installed itself on to it. But when it came to reboot, did it work?
Of course not.
So I have a drive which, so long as I don't try to boot off it, I can read/write to it perfectly well. I just can't boot off it, even after doing a new install of XP Pro.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
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Hi there CtrlAltDel!
I have just been through XP hell doing exactly the same thing, here's how I cracked it...
1) Copy everything to the new drive (sounds like you did this...)
2) Make the drive bootable. I found just the utility for this. Check out http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm. Download this, boot from floppy into DROSS and type
"bootpart winnt boot:c:".
3) That got me halfway back... Next I found that Windows keeps a record of the drive ID and mis-allocated my new drive as D: (despite being the primary master disk). Go to Q223188 in the Microsoft Win2k support database to fix this one.
4) My system seemed to be runing fine without re-activation until I disconnected the old drive to make sure that XP wasn't sneaking data off the old drive. So you may find that a call to Bill will also be needed :(
WildHacker, you're new to this site, and the current membership and this site would appreciate your not locking questions when posting comments will do! If in doubt, RTFM!
Dennis
Dennis
Dennis
RTFM? Should I ask? :)
RTFM? Should I ask? :)
Oh I'm certain that if you thought about it for a moment it would come to you. <grin>
It already had!
I could feel the fuming. LOL
I could feel the fuming. LOL
ASKER
Apologies for the delay in posting feedback, I've been ill and away from the keyboard. I'm testing this evening though.
ASKER
Well this time, I started off with another low-level format of the harddrive, and then I booted of a Windows 98 ERD, and created a new partition and formatted it as FAT32. After rebooting, the PC happily booted to the new drive.
I then used DriveImage to copy over everything from the old drive and rebooted, and now it all works great. Heaven knows why it didn't do it properly first time, but there you go.
I then used DriveImage to copy over everything from the old drive and rebooted, and now it all works great. Heaven knows why it didn't do it properly first time, but there you go.
I'm glad it worked for you, however I'm still concerned that there may be a BIOS issue that could cause data loss in the future. How big is the new hard drive? and does your Motherboard's BIOS support the size?
Clone Disk to Disk?
I want to clone a master hard drive with Windows XP (ACPI PC) Maxtor 8 gb with all my programs and custom setup to another hard drive 20 gb Fujitzu. Both hard drive are formatted NTFS, not partitioned. This will be my first experience with this process cloning to a different larger hard drive and my first experience with Ghost 2003. I have also downloaded a trial version of Ghost Corporate Trialware, but I do not think I will be able to use it to perform this process, as there are limitations in the trialware. I would like to be able to roll out multiple hard drives that will work in different computers with different hardware. I read up on Sysprep but am still not fully clear about the sysprep.ini file. I did download the sysprep files from the Windows XP corporate CD that I have, but I am not really too sure on which version of sysprep to use, as I have read different posts regarding different version problems. I followed a procedure on the Microsoft site for customizing settings and, unfortunately, the information was kind of sketchy and I blew it and overwrote my administrator settings with nothing. I since have found some useful advice on this site about how to do this procedure correctly.
Here are my questions.
Which version of sysprep works best for Windows XP Professional, (corporate version) CD, doesnt require activation?
Is there a method for me to partition my NTFS formatted hard drives? Can I partition the drive after there is operating system and data on it? Is it better to partition the hard drive before cloning or after cloning?
Is there a generic sysprep.ini file available that I can just edit not too much that will set me up to be able to roll out to multiple computers with different hardware setups?
I have read there are problems with losing configuration settings when cloning? Does this happen even if you create a new user and copy their settings to the Default User folder?
5 of the computers that I want do clone the same hard drive to are somewhat newer Hewlett Packard. In the past, I have worked on a Hewlett-Packard and because of the disc management I was unable to succeed in installing a new formatted hard drive and install an operating system to it. This was some years ago, I was not really familiar with disc management so I am not sure if the same proprietary thing goes on with certain computers as this. Will I be able to create a master hard drive in a Hewlett-Packard, set it all up, and then clone it to other Hewlett-Packard computers with slightly different hardware setups? Is it possible that Ghost can remove the (I am assuming this now) part on the hard drive that contains the disk management information? or is this coming from something in the BIOS that I can turn off?
Janell DeMello
I want to clone a master hard drive with Windows XP (ACPI PC) Maxtor 8 gb with all my programs and custom setup to another hard drive 20 gb Fujitzu. Both hard drive are formatted NTFS, not partitioned. This will be my first experience with this process cloning to a different larger hard drive and my first experience with Ghost 2003. I have also downloaded a trial version of Ghost Corporate Trialware, but I do not think I will be able to use it to perform this process, as there are limitations in the trialware. I would like to be able to roll out multiple hard drives that will work in different computers with different hardware. I read up on Sysprep but am still not fully clear about the sysprep.ini file. I did download the sysprep files from the Windows XP corporate CD that I have, but I am not really too sure on which version of sysprep to use, as I have read different posts regarding different version problems. I followed a procedure on the Microsoft site for customizing settings and, unfortunately, the information was kind of sketchy and I blew it and overwrote my administrator settings with nothing. I since have found some useful advice on this site about how to do this procedure correctly.
Here are my questions.
Which version of sysprep works best for Windows XP Professional, (corporate version) CD, doesnt require activation?
Is there a method for me to partition my NTFS formatted hard drives? Can I partition the drive after there is operating system and data on it? Is it better to partition the hard drive before cloning or after cloning?
Is there a generic sysprep.ini file available that I can just edit not too much that will set me up to be able to roll out to multiple computers with different hardware setups?
I have read there are problems with losing configuration settings when cloning? Does this happen even if you create a new user and copy their settings to the Default User folder?
5 of the computers that I want do clone the same hard drive to are somewhat newer Hewlett Packard. In the past, I have worked on a Hewlett-Packard and because of the disc management I was unable to succeed in installing a new formatted hard drive and install an operating system to it. This was some years ago, I was not really familiar with disc management so I am not sure if the same proprietary thing goes on with certain computers as this. Will I be able to create a master hard drive in a Hewlett-Packard, set it all up, and then clone it to other Hewlett-Packard computers with slightly different hardware setups? Is it possible that Ghost can remove the (I am assuming this now) part on the hard drive that contains the disk management information? or is this coming from something in the BIOS that I can turn off?
Janell DeMello
Run fdisk and check the partition to see if it is Dos and set to active