Tony said:
I first reported here 2 days ago that I had installed a new HD
and wanted that drive to be the boot drive. I used XXClone
to copy my old drive over to the new drive, but when I
attempted to boot from the new drive I was given the error
message:
"NTLDR is missing, press control-alt-del"
I tried this fix which was recommended here:
Didn't work, so I tried to reinstall XP to the new drive and
got this message:
"Setup failed to install the product Catalog, this is a fatal error"
Forget all the DOS command utilities, and make a clone
with a utility which is dedicated to the purpose of making
WinXP clones - Casper XP. Download a 30-day free
trial copy from:
www.FSSdev/products/casperxp/ .
You don't even have to close down Windows to run it.
If you want to copy the entire contents of one HD to
another HD, choose the default copy mode. If you want
copy just one partition from your old HD, choose that
mode. You don't have to prepare a partition for the
clone, as Casper XP can be told to put the clone into a
new partition that it will make from unallocated space on
the new HD.
When the copying has been done, shut down the PC,
and disconnect the old HD. Then close up the PC and
restart it. The new clone will boot up. You'll notice that
it will call its own partition "C:", just like the "parent" OS.
Then, when you've convinced yourself that it's running OK,
close down the PC again. It's important that the clone
not "see" its "parent" OS when it starts for the 1st time.
But thereafter, it's OK for the "parent" to be visible when
the clone runs.
If you want to run the old HD until it croaks, re-connect it,
and its "parent" OS will be the one that boots up. The
new clone will be seen as just another file structure on a
partition that it may call "D:" or some other letter name.
If you want to make the clone on the new HD the one that
gets run when you start up, you can either just make it the
only HD in the system and keep it jumpered as it is,
or you can make it the Master to avoid future confusion if
you add a 2nd HD.
If you want to dual-boot between the 2 OSes, you can do it
either of 2 ways:
BIOS adjustment - the HD at the head of the BIOS's HD boot
order is always the one that gets boot control. You can re-set
which HD this is by going into the BIOS. Read your owner's
manual to see how to do this. This offers the convenience of
not having to edit the boot.ini file.
Boot.ini menu - you can add a 2nd entry to the boot.ini file
of the HD which the BIOS sees at the head of the HD boot
order. (The default will be the Master on IDE ch. 0.) Entries
in the boot.ini file can designate any partition on any of the
HDs as being the one with the OS. There are several ways
to edit the boot.ini file, including just using Notepad. If you
don't want to learn the syntax of the boot.ini file, you can also
run bootcfg from the Recovery Console on the installation CD.
If you use dual-booting, also set the timeout value in boot.ini
to something reasonable like 10 seconds.
*TimDaniels*
