Boot hangs from upgd hard drive unless old drive present

[Pat Coghlan]

I have a SATA drive with C: (primary part) and D: (another primary part).

I used Norton Ghost to copy my system drive to a new (SATA) drive. I
checked the box to "make new drive active".

If I swap cables and leave the old drive running, the computer boots off
the new drive (G. I guess the fact that the new drive is G: is at the
root of the problem. The new drive references all the user directories
on D:, which is on the original drive.

If I disconnect the old drive, I get the WinXP splash screen and then a
small Windows logo on a blue screen, similar to the one that appears
after one has entered the logon password. Unfortunately, things do not
progress beyond that screen.

Should I have left the two partitions on the new drive unformatted
without assigned drive letters prior to doing the image copy?

 

[DL]

If a new boot drive wont, unless the old drive is still connected it usually
means that the boot record is on the old drive.
When you use an Image app to transfer the boot drive to a new drive, once
the transfer is complete you have to shutdown the sys, connect new drive as
primary and disconnect old drive before rebooting.

 

[Pat Coghlan]

It boots (splash screen etc.), but things stall at the blue screen with
a small Windows logo which shows up after entering the password for a
user account.

 

[DL]

Then either your image process went wrong, or you didnt proceed correctly.
Assuming you did actually disconect the old drive and connected new as
master before rebooting

 

[Pat Coghlan]

Apparently I didn't disconnect the old drive after rebooting, only
changed the order of the drives in the BIOS.

With just the new drive, it booted okay, although it couldn't find the
D: (user files) drive. I just had to assign it a drive letter.

Thanks.