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PLEASE HELP:Copied old hard drive to new drive in XP, now PC will not boot

bjhorrell

Junior Member

bjhorrell
Junior Member

Posts: 3
Joined: Jul 2001
Thursday March 14, 2002 10:16 PM



I had a 30GB drive with three partions. I copied each partition to a new 80GB drive, with norton gohst 2002.

All the files are on the new drive, I removed the old one as the primary and replaced it with the new one.

Now when I try to boot it say "PRESS A KEY TO REBOOT".

I have the student version of windows XP pro, so I never had to activate it.

Any ideas on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated.

I have tried somef the things in the restor console, but none have helped.

Thanks in advance,
Ben

 
You need at make one of the partitions on the new drive active using fdisk. It should be the one with the OS on it.
 
One of the several issues(in NT, not 98) is a changed disk GUID (Globally Uniquie Identifier). To fix this, boot with a DOS floppy and run "fdisk /mbr".
 
You copied the files, but didn't copy the master boot record or the partition boot record, which are necessary parts of the computer's startup process. These are not files, they're raw data structures and assembly language code on raw sectors on the disk. You can't copy these using file copy methods.

What you're doing is, you realize, a totally unsupported way of installing an OS?

As long as you realize that what you're doing can't be supported and is Not a Very Good Idea, you can attempt to use the FIXMBR and FIXBOOT commands from the recovery console to write the MBR and the partition boot record. As reicherb says, you need to also ensure that you've marked the appropriate partition active in the partition table in the MBR.

These low level details are all taken care of properly when you install XP using the setup program. And is one of the reasons what you're doing is not a very good way to move an OS from one drive to another.

If your goal is to move the OS from one drive to another, then use ntbackup to back up all your files (to another local drive or a network drive), swap drives, install XP, then restore using ntbackup. That's probably the safest way to accomplish this.
 
I just used Power Quest's Drive Copy 3.0
to copy the hard drive(with Win XP installed) to a new one.
No problems at all.
 
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