Upgraded hard drive, now Win2K will only boot from floppy

[Eldin]

Win2K was running nicely on my HP 4150 laptop with a 6GB
Toshiba hard drive inside. The 6GB drive was getting very
full, so I bought a 12GB IBM hard drive as an upgrade.
Norton Ghost was used to do an image transfer of the old
drive to the new one, which I temporarily put into an even
older laptop I had sitting around. I did not allow the
older laptop to boot-up from the new image, to prevent
Win2K from resetting system parameters to match the older
laptop.

The new IBM hard drive has been installed in the HP laptop
now for about a year, and has performed flawlessly, except
that the machine will only boot-up from a floppy disk. It
will not boot from the hard drive.

The Win2K has been updated through SP4 and is being kept
current using Windows Update. Today, I found a
KnowledgeBase article about NTLdr having trouble reading a
large, fragmented System Hive file, so I followed the
recommended solution, but it didn't help.

I've used Win2K Recovery Console to run FIXBOOT C:, and
I've tried FIXMBR \Device\Harddisk0\Partition1, which is
the partition on which C: lives, but I'm not sure that is
the correct partition. The \Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 is
shown as containing 0 bytes, which is why I've applied
FIXMBR to Partition1. Doing so, however, causes the
machine to declare "Invalid partition table", and then
FIXBOOT C: must be used to recover access to the hard
drive. Should I be using
FIXMBR \Device\Harddisk0\Partition0
instead?

Any suggestions for how to make this machine boot from the
hard drive? Thanks for reading through this.

 

[Kevin McNiel [MSFT]]

I believe the information in Knowledge Base article 167045 Reasons Why
Windows NT Does Not Boot From a Shadow Mirror Drive
(http://support.microsoft.com/?id=167045) regarding disk translation is what
is causing the problem you are having booting from the hard drive. There are
some things to check (which you may have already done). Take a look at the
article and post your findings.

Kevin McNiel, MCSE/MCSA
Platform Server Setup Group

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Please reply to the Group only, This address cannot receive incoming
messages.

 

[Guest]

This article certainly provides the best explanation I've
found for what is required to get a hard drive to work in
a specific machine running Win2K. Based on what I read
here, I used the BACKUP utility in Win2K to do a complete
backup of the C: drive and I moved all files on the D:
drive to other safe places. In the end, I had to reformat
the hard drive, make new partitions of similar size to the
original partitions and reinstall two copies of Win2K on
the machine. The first copy was installed on C:, just to
get the installation process to initialize this drive as
the BOOT drive. After making sure that this copy would
bootup from the hard drive, I next installed a second copy
of Win2K on the D: drive. After tweaking this second copy
to join my workgroup, I logged onto the D: copy of Win2K
and from there logged onto the second machine where the C:
backup had been stored. Using the D: copy of Win2K, I
restored the C: drive to its original state. Before
restoring it, however, I saved a copy of the BOOT.INI file
to a safe location on the D: drive, so it could be put
back on C: after the restore completed. When I was finally
satisfied that all was working OK with the restored copy
on C:, I reformatted D: to wipe out all traces of the
second copy. Whew! What a job, and all that just to get a
larger hard drive.