Cloning SATA HD

[Guest]

I used Norton Save & Restore to clone my 80GB HD to a new Samsung 300GB
drive. All went OK until I tried to swap the drives. The system booted from
the old C-drive instead of the new one. So I powered down and removed the
old one. When I powered up, it hangs on the XP splash screen. I'm back to
my old drive. Any ideas how I can get my Dell Dimension 4700 to see the new
drive and boot from it?

Thx,

GDS

 

[Thomas Wendell]

I used Norton Save & Restore to clone my 80GB HD to a new Samsung
300GB drive. All went OK until I tried to swap the drives. The
system booted from the old C-drive instead of the new one. So I
powered down and removed the old one. When I powered up, it hangs on
the XP splash screen. I'm back to my old drive. Any ideas how I can
get my Dell Dimension 4700 to see the new drive and boot from it?

Thx,

GDS

The idea is to clone old disk to new, COMPLETELY REMOVE/DISCONNECT old disk
from system and let it boot from the new disk (a couple of times, maybe?).
THEN you can connect the old disk as slave...

--
Tumppi
=================================
A lot learned from these newsgroups
Helsinki, FINLAND
(translations from/to FI not always accurate
=================================

 

[Kerry Brown]

You may have to edit the bot.ini file on the SATA drive so XP knows which
drive to load from. The boot.ini is pointing to the IDE drive.

Thomas Wendell is right as well. If you boot from the old drive before
booting from the new drive XP sometimes writes a new signature to the new
drive causing it to become unbootable. Either one could be the problem.

 

[Guest]

You may have to edit the bot.ini file on the SATA drive so XP knows which
drive to load from. The boot.ini is pointing to the IDE drive.

Thomas Wendell is right as well. If you boot from the old drive before
booting from the new drive XP sometimes writes a new signature to the new
drive causing it to become unbootable. Either one could be the problem.

Kerry and Thomas,

There is no BOOT.INI file on either drive to edit. Also, SATA jumpers are
only used for potential incompatibility with 1.5GB SATA adapters; there is no
ability to set Master/Slave. So neither of your posts helped me,
unfortunately. Removing the old drive resulted in the hang on the splash
screen.

 

[Anna]

Kerry and Thomas,
There is no BOOT.INI file on either drive to edit. Also, SATA jumpers are
only used for potential incompatibility with 1.5GB SATA adapters; there is
no
ability to set Master/Slave. So neither of your posts helped me,
unfortunately. Removing the old drive resulted in the hang on the splash
screen.

Geoff:
As Thomas Wendell ("Tumppi"?) pointed out...

After you perform the disk-to-disk cloning operation you should disconnect
your source HDD (the 80 GB one) and make the initial boot with ONLY the
destination HDD (the 300 GB SATA HDD) connected. Thereafter, assuming the
disk cloning operation was successful, you can re:connect the old HDD and
access your BIOS to ensure that the boot priority order indicates the SATA
HDD will be your boot drive. (I'm assuming that's what you want).

It's unclear from your last post if you followed Thomas' instructions.
Anna

 

[Kerry Brown]

Kerry and Thomas,

There is no BOOT.INI file on either drive to edit. Also, SATA jumpers are
only used for potential incompatibility with 1.5GB SATA adapters; there is
no
ability to set Master/Slave. So neither of your posts helped me,
unfortunately. Removing the old drive resulted in the hang on the splash
screen.

More info is needed about the drives. Are they both SATA?

 

[Guest]

http://www.acronis.com/
Try the 15 day trialware ver of ATI 10, may help, your call..
Cheers
j;-j

 

[Guest]

Geoff:
As Thomas Wendell ("Tumppi"?) pointed out...

After you perform the disk-to-disk cloning operation you should disconnect
your source HDD (the 80 GB one) and make the initial boot with ONLY the
destination HDD (the 300 GB SATA HDD) connected. Thereafter, assuming the
disk cloning operation was successful, you can re:connect the old HDD and
access your BIOS to ensure that the boot priority order indicates the SATA
HDD will be your boot drive. (I'm assuming that's what you want).

It's unclear from your last post if you followed Thomas' instructions.
Anna

Anna,

I did exactly what he recommended. The new SATA drive (300GB) is in an
external enclosure, so I don't have to keep swapping drives into/out of the
bays.
After the copy completed, I shutdown, disconnected the old drive from the
primary SATA port, moved the new drive's SATA cable from the secondary to the
primary port, and restarted.

After several restarts, the freezes continued, so I hooked up the old drive
to the SECONDARY SATA port, hoping the machine would boot from the new drive
and view the old drive as just a data drive. However, the old drive was
still the C-drive, XP found it and booted up from it. There's my second
question: how do I switch the new drive to become the C-drive? XP with the
SATA setup seems to look for C, not for the drive that's physically on the
primary SATA port.

 

[Guest]

:

More info is needed about the drives. Are they both SATA?

Yes, see my reply to Anna for more details.

BTW, Symantec's tech support rep just emailed me and recommended using
fdisk/mbr on the new drive. She thinks the MBR is corrupted. Not knowing
what's in an MBR (is it volume-specific info?), I can't evaluate this piece
of advice. The MBR was successfully copied from the old drive by Norton Save
& Restore. Does the MBR for the new drive have to be different from the old
drive, or exactly the same?

Plus, FDISK.EXE is not part of WinXP, so even if I could find a copy, I'm
reluctant to run it.

 

[Guest]

http://www.acronis.com/
Try the 15 day trialware ver of ATI 10, may help, your call..
Cheers
j;-j

I've seen this product on several forums and am going to give this approach
about 3 more days before I give up and try that route. I also have Partition
Magic 8.0, but sadly, it's not owned by Symantec so any vestiges of quality
support have vanished.

 

[C.Wilder]

I used Norton Save & Restore to clone my 80GB HD to a new Samsung
300GB drive. All went OK until I tried to swap the drives. The
system booted from the old C-drive instead of the new one. So I
powered down and removed the old one. When I powered up, it hangs on
the XP splash screen. I'm back to my old drive. Any ideas how I can
get my Dell Dimension 4700 to see the new drive and boot from it?

Thx,

GDS

Don't save and restore. Ghost it. Save and restore is not a clone of the
original.

CW

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your reply Geoff..
I still use the PowerQuest PM 7, still works fine for me, as to your PM 8,
is it the PowerQuest PM 8 ver..? Symantec did buy out PowerQuest and do offer
a PM8 upgrade, if you can call it that, see link below..
http://shop.symantecstore.com/DRHM/...ocale=en_US&ThemeID=106300&productID=44334700
Though they have not been able or willing to offer updates or upgrades since
(ver 8) the takeover, what a shame, their just going to let it fade into
obscurity, I guess..
If you have Norton Ghost use it (to clone), as previously mentioned by CW..
Cheers
j;-j

 

[Anna]

Anna,
I did exactly what he recommended. The new SATA drive (300GB) is in an
external enclosure, so I don't have to keep swapping drives into/out of
the bays. After the copy completed, I shutdown, disconnected the old
drive from the primary SATA port, moved the new drive's SATA cable from
the secondary to the primary port, and restarted.

After several restarts, the freezes continued, so I hooked up the old
drive to the SECONDARY SATA port, hoping the machine would boot from the
new drive and view the old drive as just a data drive. However, the old
drive was still the C-drive, XP found it and booted up from it. There's
my second question: how do I switch the new drive to become the C-drive?
XP with the SATA setup seems to look for C, not for the drive that's
physically on the primary SATA port.

Don't save and restore. Ghost it. Save and restore is not a clone of the
original.

CW

Geoff:
Never having used Symantec's Norton Save & Restore program myself, I was
taking at face value your indication that it's a disk cloning program that
will create a bootable HDD.

Is C. Wilder's statement correct, i.e., his (her) inference that the program
is *not* designed to create a bootable copy of a source HDD?

We'll assume (at least for the moment) that the Norton S&R program has the
capability of creating a bootable, functional clone of a bootable,
functional HDD. Have you successfully worked with this program before? Or is
this your first experience with it?

Anyway, we'll assume it has disk-to-disk cloning capability. If so, assuming
there was no problem with your connection/configuration of a non-defective
SATA HDD (and it does sound from your description that you did everything
"right"), then could the problem simply be a disk cloning operation that
went awry? This happens with the best of programs. Have you tried repeating
the disk cloning operation more than once? Same problem?

I'm also assuming that when you have both drives connected and the system
boots to the 80 GB HDD (as has been happening), you can access the 300 GB
HDD and it appears (at least on the face of it) that all the data on the
source disk was, in fact, cloned to the 300 GB one.

Anyway...if you're unsuccessful with the Norton program you may want to give
the Acronis True Image a try as you indicated in another post. Based on our
experience it's a very reliable program both with respect to disk-to-disk
cloning and creating disk images. As Jaymon informed you, Acronis has a
15-day trial version available. So you may want to give it a try. We
recently prepared step-by-step instructions for using the Acronis program.
Our post was dated 1/25/07 under the subject Re: Adding USB external hard
disk drive for cloning with Acronis True Image. You may want to take a look
at it.
Anna

 

[Kerry Brown]

There is no fdisk in XP. You can boot to the recovery console and use the
fixmbr command. This may fix the problem. I have never used Norton Save and
Restore so I'm not sure how it works. I use Acronis True Image. I have used
several versions of Norton Ghost but never Save and Restore. I would try the
cloning procedure again. I would hook up the new drive to the SATA0 port and
the old drive to the SATA1 port. Boot from the Norton CD and clone from
there. Do not reboot when the cloning is finished. Power down and remove the
old drive from the SATA1 port. Boot from the new drive. Once you can
successfully boot from the new drive you can hook the old drive back up if
you want.

 

[Guest]

There is no fdisk in XP. You can boot to the recovery console and use the
fixmbr command. This may fix the problem. I have never used Norton Save and
Restore so I'm not sure how it works. I use Acronis True Image. I have used
several versions of Norton Ghost but never Save and Restore. I would try the
cloning procedure again. I would hook up the new drive to the SATA0 port and
the old drive to the SATA1 port. Boot from the Norton CD and clone from
there. Do not reboot when the cloning is finished. Power down and remove the
old drive from the SATA1 port. Boot from the new drive. Once you can
successfully boot from the new drive you can hook the old drive back up if
you want.

Kerry,

<<You can boot to the recovery console>> ...need a little guidance on that
one.

Norton S&R is a Windows-based program, unlike Ghost...cannot boot from the
Norton CD. Looks like I should have bought Ghost, or Acronis.

Geoff

 

[Guest]

Anna,

Answers below in context.

Geoff

Geoff:
Never having used Symantec's Norton Save & Restore program myself, I was
taking at face value your indication that it's a disk cloning program that
will create a bootable HDD.

===> It is. There is specific functionality for that.

Is C. Wilder's statement correct, i.e., his (her) inference that the program
is *not* designed to create a bootable copy of a source HDD?

===> No, I think CW was thinking "save and restore" as a generic operation.
He may not be aware of this product from Symantec. It's only been out a few
months. Reportedly it has Ghost contained within it.

We'll assume (at least for the moment) that the Norton S&R program has the
capability of creating a bootable, functional clone of a bootable,
functional HDD. Have you successfully worked with this program before? Or is
this your first experience with it?

===> Just bought it to do this operation.

Anyway, we'll assume it has disk-to-disk cloning capability. If so, assuming
there was no problem with your connection/configuration of a non-defective
SATA HDD (and it does sound from your description that you did everything
"right"), then could the problem simply be a disk cloning operation that
went awry? This happens with the best of programs. Have you tried repeating
the disk cloning operation more than once? Same problem?

===> I did it three times, no error codes.

I'm also assuming that when you have both drives connected and the system
boots to the 80 GB HDD (as has been happening), you can access the 300 GB
HDD and it appears (at least on the face of it) that all the data on the
source disk was, in fact, cloned to the 300 GB one.

===> That's correct. All the data looks fine, and I even examined it in
Windows Manage and Partition Magic 8.0, and I see the three partitions on the
new drive.

 

[Kerry Brown]

TI has a 15 day free trial.

 

[Guest]

Anna,

All fixed. The problem with XP controlling the drive letters was solved
when I was directed to this site:
http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm#method3 by Brian from the
Radified Guide site:
http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=ghost9_10;action=display;num=1170610960

Dan Goodell's explanation and various methods to solve the problem was a
life-saver. Check it out.

Geoff