Windows XP question

Gustavus

Golden Member
Oct 9, 1999
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My main system had a corrupted Windows XP installation, so I decided to do what I thought would be an easy and foolproof fix. On another system I set up Windows XP with SP3 and a bare minimum of software -- drivers for the Turtlebeach Santa Cruz sound card which both systems have etc. I pulled the 500 GB drive with the corrupted install of Windows, made it the slave in the other system and did a full NTFS format. I then used Acronis Migrate Easy to clone the drive in that system to the newly formatted hard drive. I then made the 500 GB drive the master and pulled the old drive. The system booted perfectly to exactly the state I had set up on the old drive. In other words the cloned drive when set to active and master booted the system just as if it were the original drive. Of course that is exactly what it should do.

I then reinstalled the cloned drive in the original computer. It is the master on IDE 1, and there is no slave. The BIOS sees it correctly during the bootup. The system will not boot though and reports a failure in reading the OS.

The Windows install on the drive is certainly good and it boots in the second machine. With no changes -- no jumpers changed or anything -- it will not boot in it's home computer.

Any ideas? I spent so long formatting a 500 GB drive I don't want to take a chance of screwing up what I have done, but can't see any explanation for why it isn't booting in this machine when it does in the other.

PS
The only difference between the two machines is that the older system is on an ABIT IC7 motherboard and the newer one is on an ABIT IS7 motherboard. Same Intel chipsets, north and south bridges etc.
 

RebateMonger

Elite Member
Dec 24, 2005
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The "standard" way to fix a corrupted XP installation is to perform an XP Repair Install. It may not be a permanent fix if the system has been hit by malware, but it'll usually fix XP that's been damaged by other causes.

Before spending time on this, though, make sure that you've tested your memory and hard drive. If you have bad hardware, you want to fix that first.

The usual reason that an XP system from another motherboard won't boot is because of the hard drive controller. It looks like both boards had an Intel ICH5R controller onboard, But there may be a Silicon Image controller, too. Did you use the Intel controller on both systems? Were both controllers in the same mode (IDE Compatibility Mode or ACHI Mode)?