New Harddrive Woes

[ottothecow]

I picked up a 160gb seagate HDD to replace the almost full 27gb (and yes...its an IBM deathstar that has managed to keep chugging) in an aging machine.

I hook up the drive, run it through the quick format with the seagate disk utilities and then use Ghost 9 to clone the old drive to the new drive. Everything appears to be on the new drive (this is hte second time I have tried the clone operation) but if I shutdown and remove the old drive, I cannot get the system to boot all of the way up. It makes it through the black windows startup screen and brings up the mouse/blue background but then it just hangs. It shows the Windows icon and says windows...I can still move the mouse, and it sounds like the harddrive might be doing something but I have left it for a fair amount of time and it fails to make progress.

Some info:
It is a PIII 600 dell, the HDD's are on a Promise ULTRA66 controller card (and are on seperate IDE channels when cloned). The OS is XP Pro Corporate and was last installed with a slipstreamed SP2 disk.

 

[montag451]

Most likely, the drive is only recognised as 137GB or so.
Can you check this in BIOS.
What you might have to do is use a drive overlay, or, if you are lucky, you may find a BIOS update that addresses this issue.
Terms to look for:
48bit LBA support

 

[ottothecow]

I thought I had the 48bit LBA issues cleared. I updated the Promise controller's bios to one that would be more likely than the original to support it (though I did this after I ghosted the drive).

I am going to try and install a new bios on the MOBO as well and I may have to just ditch the controller card and use the motherboard IDE channels.

I'll do some flashing, re-clone the drive and report back with my findings.

 

[montag451]

nice one.
GOOD luck.

 

[ottothecow]

Alright, I have gotten rid of any 48bit LBA problems (the motherboard IDE supports it with the bios I already had) but even after reghosting I get the same problem. I think this is more of a windows problem now. I tried a repair installation on the new drive (since it can boot ALMOST to the login screen) and it was the slowest XP install I have ever done. When it finished, I coudl boot the computer into windows but it ran incredibly slow.

What does it look like it might be now?

 

[ottothecow]

Alright, I tried cloning the drive again but this time I booted up to Ranish and used it to copy the drive instead of Ghost.

It worked and booted up perfectly (just in a small partition). I will try expanding the partition with partition magic and then see if I can still use my controller card.