Migrating to new HDD

[Shafin]

Hi,
I have recently bought a new HDD and used Acronis migrate easy to
migrate my old partitions to the new one. I am dual booting XP and
Vista.

Now I plan to remove my old HDD from the system. The problem is, my
copied XP and Vista works great when the old HDD is attached to the
system. But when I remove it, windows loads,then when the mouse comes
in,you know, the time when everything is black and only the mouse is
visible, I can move the mouse. But just as the login screen comes, my
mouse and keyboard freezes, I can't move the mouse, I cant write
anything. Pressing the Num Lock, Caps Lock button has no effects on
respective LEDs. So using the restart button in the casing is the only
option. This happens both in vista and XP. As soon as I reconnect the
old HDD, everything goes back to normal. I really need to ditch the
old HDD, and please don't tell me to reinstall windows. I need to
preserve my vista settings and I don't want to reinstall all the apps
again,and I'm not sure if that's possible with vista.

Thanks in advance for helping.

 

[smlunatick]

Hi,
I have recently bought a new HDD and used Acronis migrate easy to
migrate my old partitions to the new one. I am dual booting XP and
Vista.

Now I plan to remove my old HDD from the system. The problem is, my
copied XP and Vista works great when the old HDD is attached to the
system. But when I remove it, windows loads,then when the mouse comes
in,you know, the time when everything is black and only the mouse is
visible, I can move the mouse. But just as the login screen comes, my
mouse and keyboard freezes, I can't move the mouse, I cant write
anything. Pressing the Num Lock, Caps Lock button has no effects on
respective LEDs. So using the restart button in the casing is the only
option. This happens both in vista and XP. As soon as I reconnect the
old HDD, everything goes back to normal. I really need to ditch the
old HDD, and please don't tell me to reinstall windows. I need to
preserve my vista settings and I don't want to reinstall all the apps
again,and I'm not sure if that's possible with vista.

Thanks in advance for helping.

You problem seems to be the fact that your older hard drive might
still be you primary boot drive. Are you running IDE / ATAPI hard
drives? You need to set up the newer hard drive as you primary boot
drive and MASTER on the IDE cable

 

[Andy]

Run Disk Management under both XP and Vista, and check the status of
the partitions on the old HDD. None of the partitions should be
system, boot, or paging.

 

[Frank-FL]

Hi,
I have recently bought a new HDD and used Acronis migrate easy to
migrate my old partitions to the new one. I am dual booting XP and
Vista.

Now I plan to remove my old HDD from the system. The problem is, my
copied XP and Vista works great when the old HDD is attached to the
system. But when I remove it, windows loads,then when the mouse comes
in,you know, the time when everything is black and only the mouse is
visible, I can move the mouse. But just as the login screen comes, my
mouse and keyboard freezes, I can't move the mouse, I cant write
anything. Pressing the Num Lock, Caps Lock button has no effects on
respective LEDs. So using the restart button in the casing is the only
option. This happens both in vista and XP. As soon as I reconnect the
old HDD, everything goes back to normal. I really need to ditch the
old HDD, and please don't tell me to reinstall windows. I need to
preserve my vista settings and I don't want to reinstall all the apps
again,and I'm not sure if that's possible with vista.

Thanks in advance for helping.

If you booted up after the migration with the old HDD still installed you are
just SOL.
For me the safest way to migrate to a new HDD is to use the updated Acronis
CD disk.

 

[Shafin]

Thanks to all of you for helping. However, the problem lied somewhere
else, I had to manually edit all my drive letters from registry editor
to get the new drive to work without the old one.

A little trivia is that bcdedit still uses the old drive letters

 

[xcal]

Perhaps, after Acronis migration, you had remove physically the old drive
from your computer, and to place the new hard disk exactly on the same
place, with the same master/primary bios configurations,

... and only then, start Windows.

only if all is ok, then you place your old hard disk

hope this helps, Carlos.