I want to make an HD bootable and then store it away

[jeffmgson]

My OS is Windows XP Pro. I have Western Digital (WD) Data Lifeguard. My master is a 30 GB Maxtor ATA 100, my current slave is a WD 40 GB 100 ATA, and my new drive is a WD 120 GB ATA.

All I want is this. I want to transfer the contents of my current master to my current slave, then make sure my current slave can be attached as my master and will boot my computer normally, and then remove it to a safe place and put in my new 120 GB HD. I've asked people on the Usenet 24hoursupport.helpdesk, Majorgeeks, and ComputerHope, and I cannot get a simple answer that I can both understand and implement. Somebody pointed out that with WD Data Lifeguard I can make my slave a bootable HD. However, when I went into Data Lifeguard to do so, the message screens that came up gave the impression that once thiswas done, my computer would no longer boot to my current master.

I've been reading on the net about fdisk and MBRs, but it would take me the next twenty hours of research to understand enough about the subject to do this safely without destroying what I already have. I don't have a spare bootable HD yet, but at least everything works right now. I don't want to just type in commands and use utilities that I've never tried before in the hopes that I'm doing everything right and won't screw up. The whole point here IS NOT TO HAVE TO REINSTALL WINDOWS AND ALL OF MY SOFTWARE AND DATA. If I can find out how to do what I want, great! If I try something and totally screw up, then I've lost 25 GB of data, software, etc, and can go back to square one.

Considering that the most I know how to do is how to physically install a HD, a CD player or a new RAM chip, could somebody tell me step-by-step what I need to do to make my current slave into a bootable HD? I've copied all the data from my master to it, but I'd happily do so again if need be. I thought when I coied everything, all I would have to do is plug it into the IDE cable as my master and fix the jumper setting, and my computer would think it was the same HD as my old master. Obviously I was wrong, as it hung up at the 'verifying DMI pool' stage.

Can some user here provide me with a more useful approach than the people on the last three forums I've tried? I'm getting more and more depressed with each passing hour, as I never knew this would be so complicated (and frustrating).

Thank you for your time and patience.

 

[Harvey]

Norton Ghost will clone your entire drive to another, and it will be a bootable equivalent of the source drive. It's available as a stand alone or as part of Norton System Works Pro. Use it to create a bootable floppy with the Ghost program. Then, plug both drives in, start the program, and follow the instructions.

Simple enough?

 

[ronach]

Your hard drive manufacturers website should have a utility that you can copy, to make a boot disk with all the files necessary to make your copied hard drive bootable. After you make the boot disk, shut down, disconnect your primary hard drive from the ribbon cable, jumper your copied hard drive to be a master, connect it in the same place on the ribbon cable as the other master was, usually on the end, then go into the bios on the next boot, verify that your sys has detected your new master drive correctly, then set the bios to boot from the 1.44 floopy disk this next time so you can run the program that is on it. After your drive has been made bootable, you will have to go tell the bios to boot from your new master drive again. That's basically it, there are other ways to do it but they are a lil more involved. Since you have copied all the files from one drive to the other, all you will be doing is making the other drive be recognised as a bootable drive, which is your goal. I should caution you here that the program on the floopy will more than likely have options to format your drive, resize it ect, select only the option to make your drive bootable. ronach

 

[montag451]

go to START
RUN
type
sys xx:
where xx is the letter of the drive.

I think that might make it bootable

 

[TheGreenGoblin]

People , there is a huge difference between making a drive "bootable" and cloning a disk.

I can copy DOS system files to a new disk and make it bootable , but all it'll show me is a dos prompt.

You should listen to Harvey. What you're trying to do is very simple with Norton Ghost.

 

[jeffmgson]

(Please dont mind the typos.. This problem, which I've been dealing with for at least 48 hours, has me hitting the bottle for stress relief)

I've gotten a bit farther. The WD software for Drive Copy said that the new copy of the old disc woud be bootable. I couldn't run Drive copy until I erased D:/. At that point it ran. It wouldn't copy 3 files. which it said weren't essential and would proibably be recreated when I restarted Window. One was the System Restore boot directory, and I think one was page.sys.

Anyway, now I get through the initiial welcome screen to Windows XP, but it hangs up after that. I trised starting in safe mode, thinking if I didn't load all the device driver it may boot , but no luck there. I wanted to remove D:/ i hopes it was hanging up looking or the missing drive, but D;? was identified as my WD 400 BB drive which I was trying to to boot to, so I didn't think removing D:/ was a good idea.

Any ideas now that I've gotten this far? At least the drive recognizes the os its supposed to load, but i have ne error log telling me where its hanging up. I'm gettin warner, but still no prize.

BTW, offtopic, but the last respondent on 2hsupportdesk.help gets the award for rudeness. He should not be allowed to respond to newbies. I'm not a newbie, but I am 90% a newbie. Fortunately, I can take a few more day trying to figure this out. I am diagnosed with severe depression though. Succeeding would make me feel a little bit better, and failing would make me feel a little it worse. Not more than two hours ago I was asking myself why I even get oot of bed.

I don't want sympathy, but I would very much appreciate help in a fomr I can understand.

 

[montag451]

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...0348&enterthread=y

 

[TheGreenGoblin]

I'd really try recloning the disk using another software.

Simplify things if you haven't already. Leave the 120GB out of the pc and remove the old master after the cloning to test if everything's ok. I'd even unplug any optical drives from the secondary ide channel and have both hard drives as masters on IDE 1 and 2 , and just slap the slave into into PRI IDE1 after the clone is done.

I'd also use the Data Lifeguard tools to test both those drives while they're in there if you haven't already.

Your original drive still loads windows properly? As long as you don't mess up your original drive , you should be able to resolve this. Find some other software to use.

I've done this quite a few times with Ghost and Drive Image and i've never had problems. Acronis True Image is another one that could do this.

You can try downloading another manufacturer's utility and try that one too if you haven't got access to any of the software mentioned above.

You might also want to use the Data Lifeguard to low level format the slave drive before you try recloning the drive.