WinXP Home won't boot without CD

[SkyDiver]

Hi,

I tried to Ghost (2002) a 4GB disk to a 15GB disk for a friend. The process errored out at about 60% complete. Suspecting that the problem may be his old computer, I tried it on my computer.

To get the drives connected, I used my the IDE channel that my normal hard drives plug into. I booted Norton Ghost 2002 from a CD and proceeded. I got the same error in the same spot. However, now when I try to boot my computer normally, with my normal hard drives in place, the system keeps re-booting. I can't get into Safe Mode, Restore Points don't work.

If I boot with the WinXP CD in the tray, it fires up to the Users Screen like normal. I checked the Hard Disk Manager and it appeared that my C: drive was no longer Active. HD Manager would not let me change it, but I managed to change it to Active via the command line.

That didn't help. I'm out of ideas. Does anybody know what could be causing this? It is an NTFS drive and there is a second drive which also has an active partition.

Thanks,
SkyDiver

 

[CalamitySymphony]

back up and reformat? strange how your HD/XP config could have changed somewhere in the swap

 

[SkyDiver]

Yeah, I can't figure that out. I've done this before many times with no problems.

 

[Brian48]

Yeah, I had this pain in the ass problem before. Was able to finally fix it by shifting the DVD-ROM to a SLAVE setting and reinstalling WinXP. Prior to that, my DVD-ROM was the Secondary Master on IDE1. For some reason, this caused this weird boot issue. Shifting it to Secondary Slave on the same IDE channel fixed it.

 

[SkyDiver]

But you still had to re-install WinXP? I was shifting devices around some. I may have switched my DVD from master to slave.....

 

[SkyDiver]

Last call. Any other ideas?

 

[Blain]

The only hardware that's changed is the HD? You're ghosting his old XP install over to his new HD?

 

[SkyDiver]

Blain: Yes. I just removed my HD's and plugged in an old IDE cable where my HD's had been and booted from a Ghost bootable CD.