richardbarlow
asked on
Cloned HDD will not boot
Lenovo W500 XP Pro. Hard drive is failing so I clone it using Ghost to a new drive. Drive clones succesfully, although it slowed down on the bad sectors. Drive is fully readable in an external reader.
Put it back in the laptop and it will not boot. POST goes through then I get a blank screen apart from a flashing prompt at the top left, i.e.e a flashing underscore or dash character.
If I try a XP repair by booting off CD it bluescreens at the "Starting Windows" part of the text-based initial installation.
WTF? I gone through this procedure hundreds & hundreds of times previously without this issue.
Thanks in advance
Put it back in the laptop and it will not boot. POST goes through then I get a blank screen apart from a flashing prompt at the top left, i.e.e a flashing underscore or dash character.
If I try a XP repair by booting off CD it bluescreens at the "Starting Windows" part of the text-based initial installation.
WTF? I gone through this procedure hundreds & hundreds of times previously without this issue.
Thanks in advance
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ASKER
Christophermagee I thInk you are correct. I'll use diskpart to get rid of it but won't be able to do that until later tonight
is the partition set to active?
Hidden partition should not be a problem if you clone system partition only. The fact that you get blank screen indicates that system partition does not have active flag. It could be assigned to that service partition instead.
Now you can boot from Ghost boot CD or Gparted and change the activity flags and since then try to boot from copied drive.
Now you can boot from Ghost boot CD or Gparted and change the activity flags and since then try to boot from copied drive.
Since you are cloning a failing drive you may be copying the areas which are corrupt, so as a result you are copying any corrupted files as well. I suggest cloning a known good system if you have more than 1 Lenovo and then copying the user's information over to the newly cloned hard drive to resolve your issues.
If you have spare hard drives, I suggest keeping an extra copy for future instances where hard drives may start failing. Typical hard drive lifespan if computer is left on 24x7 is 4-5 years.
If you have spare hard drives, I suggest keeping an extra copy for future instances where hard drives may start failing. Typical hard drive lifespan if computer is left on 24x7 is 4-5 years.
you can set it active with Bootit-ng : www.terabyteunlimited.com/
ASKER
Thanks. I cloned it again without the hidden partition
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/463605.html