Can't boot HD cloned from WinXP HD

[Tim Haynes]

Okay, here's a weird one. I think the solution may be simple, but want
to see what others think.

A friend has a very old 6GB drive that I'm replacing with a new 80GB
drive. The 6GB drive has been randomly failing. It will often boot
into safe mode but then blue screen after a few minutes.

The old 6GB drive previously had Win98 on it, and had been upgraded to
WinXP Pro.

I cloned the old HD onto the new HD, and tried booting the new HD.

Strangely, it tries to boot into Win98 (even shows the Win98 boot
graphic for about 2 seconds!) and then immediately dies horribly, asking
where COMMAND.COM is.

Now, the old drive never tried to boot into Win98. It always booted
into WinXP.

Why would the new (cloned) drive try to boot into Win98?

Here is how I cloned it:

1. Old drive is the slave (D and the new drive is the master (C.

2. Used Partition Magic to copy the primary (and only) partition from
the old drive to the new drive. It died about halway along because of
too many errors (the old drive is failing, after all)

3. Used Partition Magic to define and format a FAT32 partition on the
new drive. (The old drive had FAT32, and I knew I'd have to use DOS to
copy the old drive's filesystem onto the new drive, crossing my fingers
that only useless files would be unable to copy).

4. Used a WinME boot disk and FDISK to make the new drive's partition
the primary active partition.

5. Used the same WinME boot disk and LCOPY.EXE to copy the filesystem
from the old drive to the new drive. A few files failed, but I wasn't
watching to see which ones.

4. Set the BIOS to boot the new master drive.

5. The new drive starts booting into Win98, then crashes, asking for
COMMAND.COM.

The boot.ini looks fine to me. It's identical between the old drive and
the new drive, and the new drive attempts to boot WinXP just fine.

I tried to start a Repair install of WinXP, but the WinXP setup CD
doesn't give me the option. It seems to think that whatever is in
C:\WINDOWS is useless and that it would be okay to completely overwrite
it (losing all settings, users, user files, etc... which we definitely
DON'T want to do!).

Any ideas on what I can do to make the new drive boot into WinXP?

Thanks
Tim

 

[Tim Haynes]

Just to talk to myself out loud...

I had considered using fixboot or the MBR repair tool under the Recovery
Console... Does anybody think that either of these would fix the problem?

Thanks again

 

[Jim]

Okay, here's a weird one. I think the solution may be simple, but want
to see what others think.

A friend has a very old 6GB drive that I'm replacing with a new 80GB
drive. The 6GB drive has been randomly failing. It will often boot
into safe mode but then blue screen after a few minutes.

The old 6GB drive previously had Win98 on it, and had been upgraded to
WinXP Pro.

I cloned the old HD onto the new HD, and tried booting the new HD.

Strangely, it tries to boot into Win98 (even shows the Win98 boot
graphic for about 2 seconds!) and then immediately dies horribly, asking
where COMMAND.COM is.

There's something not clear here about how the old HD was configured, or the
new HD for that matter. I'm getting confused because it sounded initially
like he had Win98, then upgraded it to WinXP (iow, Win98 has been replaced
by XP, so Win98 is no more). But now it sounds like Win98 is still there!
So is this a case of the HD having Win98, BUT THEN, adding a new partition
for WinXP, iow, a multi-boot situation? If so, are they in their own
partitions?

Jim

 

[Tim Haynes]

There's something not clear here about how the old HD was configured, or the
new HD for that matter. I'm getting confused because it sounded initially
like he had Win98, then upgraded it to WinXP (iow, Win98 has been replaced
by XP, so Win98 is no more). But now it sounds like Win98 is still there!
So is this a case of the HD having Win98, BUT THEN, adding a new partition
for WinXP, iow, a multi-boot situation? If so, are they in their own
partitions?

Jim

Hi Jim,

Initially, the old drive had Win98, and then it was upgraded (on the
same partition) to WinXP. Not multiboot, not multiple partitions...
Just a Win98 installation upgraded to WinXP all one one partition.
That's why I don't get why the cloned drive even SHOWS the Win98 boot
logo screen at all! It shouldn't even be there anymore, IMO.

Thanks
Tim

 

[Dave Harry]

When you formatted the drive, it sounds like you SYS'd it as well.
That will usually give you a Win98 logo screen and it will definitely look
for COMMAND.COM
Which in turn also suggests that the Win98 partition is marked as active.

You can change the active partition with pqmagic.
Then yes, I'd try FIXBOOT and/or FIXMBR

 

[Tim Haynes]

Well, thanks for the comments and questions, folks. I've given up and
tried just using Ghost / Drive Image. It seems to work better now. At
least it doesn't try to boot Win98 anymore.

Thanks again!
Tim