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Cloned Hard drive does not Boot

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9 replies

by techrepublic 2 views

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I have been trying to clone (Ghost 2003) my existing 30Gb hard drive on my laptop to a 60Gb drive using an external USB case.

The clone appears to work fine but when I install the new hard drive into the laptop and boot it goes through the self test and then I get a blank screen except for a cursor in the top left hand corner(this is not a does cursor, there is no input)

I removed the external drive after cloning was complete and before reboot as recommended by Ghost to avoid booting with 2 primary partitions.

After the problems booting I put the drive back in the USB case, Win XP pro recognises it as a primary partition and all the files exist on it from my old drive. There is one 60Gb partition, formatted NTFS.

I know the jumpers are set correctly as I initially installed a fresh Win XP on it and it booted up fine.

The bios on the laptop (compaq evo n600v) does not have any settings to detect a hard drive, just boot order ie hard drive, CDROM.

I don't have a disk drive to boot to does and use FDisk, I could possibly burn a CD to boot from.

Any clues about what I would need to do to make this work? thanks in advance

9 replies

by dmiles

It's the security features(XP checks for hardware changes while booting including you hard drive ID) i've cloned my HD (using Ghost) about the same as you, a 120gig that i cloned from a 30 gig with the same results as you, XP would not boot.. I used power quest's boot majic to re write the boot sector partition information and now boot with XP just fine..I believe that MS fdisk should do the same as boot majic..even if the partition is already set to active go ahead and set it as active again to rewrite the partition info to your boot sector.. good luck

by wcp

You HAVE to run "Fdisk /mbr" without the quotes from a 98 Startup disk.

Burn a Windows 98 Startup disk to a bootable CD and run it.

by techrepublic

Thanks for the suggestions, I made a boot CD and ran FDisk to rewrite the MBR, it wouldn't let me set it as active again as it was already active. I tried some different utilities to rewrite the MBR, still the same result.

I tried using a boot loader, it comes up asking which disk to boot from (C:) when selected it still just displays the cursor, does this mean the MBR is working then?

Any other ways to get around this XP security if thats the problem?

by simy

You could repair windows by booting to the winxp cd and selecting repair when it finds an existing windows installation. You will have to reinstall any xp service packs as the repair will revert windows back to the unpatched version. All other software should remain intact. I know it's taking the long way around, but it should do the trick.

by techrepublic

I tried running the repair on the disk, when it is complete it reboots the PC, or tries to, still doesn't work. I've tried ever possible solution I could find on the web, I've now reverted to wiping the drive and installing XP Pro on fresh, only hassel is installing all the other bits of software again.... at least it works
Thanks

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