PCTech Forums

Hello. Im having some trouble with copying my hard drive for upgrading.

Old HDD: (C:) IDE 80gb
New HDD: (F:) Sata 250gb
OS: XP

(Some might say keep the 80gb as the system (OS) HDD and the 250gb as a secondary. but i want the 80gb for another computer im building.)

So I put in F: and copied C: using Norton Ghost 14.0. everything seemed fine until i tried starting with just F:. It starts up with windows loading but then it stops on a windows screen with the mouse. It does this at the point i should see the user accounts or when my background pops up.

So I put back C: and bootup. Everything looks fineand startsup fine. So I figure its the drive letter and go to see if I can change it and found out C: has a (page file?) and F: is the system drive. So my OS is running off the F: drive. Then I take C: out and bootup and then the same problem I had before was still happening.

What do I do, cause i know my copy of XP works off the F: drive but it wont startup without the C: drive in.

(BTW the F: HDD has no jumpers so I cant set those.)

Thanks

I am not sure how Norton 14 works, I only use Norton Ghost 8 in DOS mode.

There is an issue here when you make the new image (transfer data to the bigger drive).

When the image is finished, you must shut down the system and disconnect one of the drives. If you don't, the c drive will "neuter" the imaged drive and it will never boot, or vice versa. Windows will not allow two active boot drives on one system. It fixes the problem for you by disabling one drive from booting

You could boot the second drive up with a windows boot disk by itself and from the Fdisk program make the drive partition active. It's probably faster to reimage the drive.

See if that works, I don't have a copy of Norton 14 to see how this problem is addressed from the GUI windows interface. It could be something as simple as checking a box to shut down when the image is transferd.